Brian Lumley: Necroscope IV: Deadspeak

Meanwhile Harry has learned all he can of vampire history, of means to destroy them, of ancient ground which may still require cleansing of their evil. He initiates E-Branch's attack on Harkley House.

In the USSR, however, Felix Krakovitch has been killed and Alec Kyle, head of E-Branch, is falsely accused of his murder. Russian espers have taken Kyle to the Chateau Bronnitsy where they are using a combination of high technology and ESP to drain him of all knowledge. That is: all knowledge! The most severe form of brainwashing and intelligence-gathering, the treatment will leave him literally brain-dead, a husk, a body robbed of its governing mind. And when the body dies Kyle will be dumped in West Berlin with never a mark on him. That, at least, is the plan.

In the interim Yulian Bodescu has not been idle. For a long time he has been breeding something in Harkley's cellars; his Alsatian dog is more than a dog; he has raped and vampirized a visiting aunt and cousin, and even infected his own mother. The house, when E-Branch's men attack, is discovered to be a place of total lunacy, mayhem and nightmare!

Bodescu escapes, the only survivor as Harkley House goes up in cleansing fire. Intent on destroying the Keogh child, he heads north for Hartlepool. His trail is bloody and littered with E-Branch agents when finally he enters the house and climbs to Brenda Keogh's top-floor flat. The mother tries to protect her child and is hurled aside. Harry Jnr is awake; his mind contains Harry Keogh; the monster is upon them, powerful hands reaching…

Harry can do nothing. Trapped in the infant's whirlpool id, he knows that they are both about to die. But then:

Go, little Harry tells him. Through you I've learned what I had to learn. I don't need you that way any longer. But I do need you as a father. So go on, get out, save yourself. The mental attraction which binds Harry to his son's mind has been relaxed; he can now flee into the Möbius Continuum; but… he can't!

'You're my son. How can I go, and leave you here with… with this?'

But Harry Jnr has no intention of being left behind. He has his father's knowledge; he is a mature mind in the body of an infant, lacking only experience; they both flee to the Möbius Continuum!

The child has inherited much more than this, however. What the father could do, the infant son can do in spades. Harry Jnr is a Necroscope of enormous power. In the ancient cemetery just across the road, the dead answer his call. They come out of their graves, shuffle, flop, crawl from the graveyard and into the house, and up the stairs. Bodescu flees but they trap him and employ the old time-tested methods of eradication: the stake, decapitation, cleansing fire…

Harry Keogh is free, but free to do what? Incorporeal, the Möbius Continuum must eventually absorb him… or perhaps expel him elsewhere, elsewhere. However bodiless, he is still a 'foreign body' in Möbius's enigmatic emptiness of mathematical conjecture.

Except… there is a force — an attraction other than Harry Jnr's infant id — a vacuum to be filled. It is the vacuum of Alec Kyle's drained mind, and when Harry explores he is sucked in irresistibly to reanimate the brain-dead esper.

It is late September 1977, and Harry Keogh, Necroscope and explorer of the metaphysical Möbius Continuum, has taken up permanent residence in another man's body; indeed to all intents and purposes, and to anyone who doesn't know better, he is that other man. But Harry is also the natural father of a most unnatural child, a child with awesome supernatural powers.

Harry employs ultra-high explosives to blow the Chateau Bronnitsy to hell, then rides the Möbius Strip home to seek out his wife and child… only to discover that they have disappeared. Not only from England but from the face of the Earth. Indeed, entirely out of this universe!

In 1983 in the Urals, there occurs the Perchorsk Incident: an 'industrial accident' according to the Soviets, but an accident of some magnitude. In fact the Russians, seeking an answer to the USA's proposed 'Star Wars', have built and tested a laser-type weapon to create a shield against incoming missiles. The experiment is a failure; there is a blowback in the weapon; in the deeps of the Perchorsk Pass havoc is wreaked as the fabric of space-time itself receives a terrible wrenching. The world's intelligence agencies, including INTESP, are interested to discover what Moscow is hiding up there under the snow and ice and mountains — curious to know what, exactly, the Perchorsk Projekt really is or was.

A year later, and something (a UFO?) is tracked from Novaya Zemlya on a course which takes it west of Franz Josef Land and on a beeline for Ellesmere Island. Mig interceptors have been sent up from Kirovsk, south of Murmansk. The 'object' is two miles higher than the Migs when they catch up with it, but it sees them, descends and destroys them. Their debris is lost in snow and ice some six hundred miles from the Pole and a like distance short of Ellesmere. A USAF AWACS reports the Migs lost from its screens, presumed down, but hotline Moscow is curiously cautious, even ambiguous: 'What Migs? What intruder?'

The Americans, angrily: This thing is coming out of your airspace; if it sticks to its present course it will be intercepted, forced to land. If it fails to comply or acts hostile, it may even be shot down.'

And unexpectedly: 'Good!' from the Russians. 'We renounce it utterly. Do with it as you see fit.'

Two USAF fighters have meanwhile been scrambled up from a strip near Port Fairfield, Maine. The AWACS guides them to their target; at close to Mach 2 they've crossed the Hudson Bay from the Belcher Islands to a point two hundred miles north of Churchill. The AWACS is left behind a little, but their target is dead ahead at 10,000 feet. They spot it…

… And take it out — no questions asked — one look at it is enough reason to fire on the Thing! Equipped with experimental air-to-air Firedevils, the USAF planes succeed where the Migs paid the price. The thing burns, blows apart over the Hudson Bay, crashes to earth. The AWACS has caught up, gets the whole thing on film. Eventually British E-Branch is invited (a) to a picture show, and (b) to offer an educated opinion… a guess… anything will be appreciated.

E-Branch keeps its expert opinion to itself — for the sanity of the world! Reason: the thing from Perchorsk was obviously similar — very similar — to the monstrosity that Yulian Bodescu bred in his cellars, also to the Thibor Ferenczy remnant burned on the cruciform hills of Romania. Except that by comparison they were pigmies and this one was a giant — and armoured! In a nutshell, it was a thing of vampire protoflesh, and E-Branch suspects that the Russians at Perchorsk made it: an incredible biological experiment which perhaps broke free of its controlled or test environment! This is one theory, at least. But not the only one. E-Branch contrives to put a contact inside the Perchorsk Projekt to act as a spy and telepathic transmitter. Before he is discovered they learn enough to convince them of the world-threatening evil of the place, even enough to cause them to re-establish their old contact with Harry Keogh.

It is 1985. Eight years since Yulian Bodescu died and Harry wrecked the Chateau Bronnitsy, eight long years since his half-deranged wife and her necroscopic child fled, apparently right out of this world. And ever since then he's been looking for them. They are not dead, for if they were the teeming dead would know it and likewise Harry Keogh. But if they're alive… then Harry no longer knows where to search. He has exhausted every bolthole, searched everywhere.

Darcy Clarke, head of INTESP, goes to see Harry at his Edinburgh home. He starts to tell him about Perchorsk but Harry isn't interested. As Clarke fills in the details, however, Harry's interest picks up. His old enemies the Soviet mindspies have established a cell at Perchorsk to block metaphysical prying. They're obviously hiding something big, something very unpleasant. They have a regiment of troops up there in the mountains, equipped with real firepower — for what? Who is likely to attack the Urals? Who do the Russians think they're keeping out?… What are they keeping in?