Brian Lumley - Necroscope IV - Deadspeak

'You never loved me!' she accused, spitting out the words and showing her altered teeth. And for the first time he saw how her eyes, and Ken Layard's, were yellow and feral. Later they would turn red… if he were to fail and let them have a later.

And now Harry looked again, more closely, at these two prisoners of Janos, one who'd been a lover and the other something of a friend, and saw how well 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-dimensional cardboard figure, which had been partly crushed.

Harry's thoughts were as good as spoken words. 'But I was crushed, Harry!' Layard looked up and told him, speaking to the empty air. 'On Karpathos, in a moment when Janos was distracted, I broke a length 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 vampire stuff in me is healing me now, but I'll never be straight again.'

Harry's pity welled up and threatened to engulf him, but he forced it down. 'Why did you call me here? To advise me, or to weaken me with remorse and regrets — 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 make no progress,' 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 something of desperation, and for the first time in his life realized it was probably true. Once upon a time, maybe, but no longer. Manolis Papastamos had been right 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 what we want, 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… has… he 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 him. 'I couldn't do anything like that again. 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 might! He might!' Sandra jumped up. 'Perhaps Janos is wrong!'

'About what?' Harry felt he'd broken through and was now getting somewhere. 'Perhaps he's wrong 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 embroiled in it: a chaos spawning 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 him say:

'So, give you enough rope and you hang yourselves. I knew you would contact him! Well, and what you have done for yourselves you can doubtless do for me. So be it!'

Turbulent in his Rhodian hotel bed, Harry might have woken up there and then; but no sooner was his contact with Sandra and Layard broken than another voice intruded on his dreams, this time a far more welcome visitation:

Harry? Did you call out? Did you call His Name, Harry, into the void?

It was Möbius, but the waft and whisper of his deadspeak voice told the Necroscope that he was just as mazed and wandering as ever. 'His name?' Harry mumbled, still tossing and turning in his sticky sheets but gradually settling down again. 'Your name, do you mean? Probably. But that was earlier.'

No, His Name! Möbius insisted.

'I don't know what you're talking about,' Harry was bewildered.

Ah! Möbius sighed, partly in relief but mainly in disappointment. But I thought for a moment that you had reached a similiar conclusion. Not at all impossible, nor even improbable. For as you know, I've always considered you my peer, Harry.

He still wasn't making much sense, but Harry didn't like to tell him so. His respect for Möbius was limitless. 'Your peer?' he finally answered. 'Hardly that, sir. And whatever new conclusion you've reached, no way that I could ever match it. Not any more, for I'm not the man I used to be. Which is the reason I was looking for you.'

Ah, yes! I remember now: something about losing your deadspeak? Something about being innumerate? Well, as for the former, obviously not-for how else would you be speaking to me right now? And innumerate? What, Harry Keogh? Möbius chuckled. That is not how I would describe you!

Harry's turn to sigh his relief. Möbius's mind, at first misty, was at last coming through to him with something of its usual crystal clarity. He pressed his case:

'But that's just it: it's the only way to describe what's happened to me. I am now innumerate; I can't conjure the equations; I no longer have access to the Möbius Continuum. And I need the Continuum now as never before.'

Innumerate! the other said yet again, plainly astonished. But how may I accept it? How may I believe it of you? You were my star pupil! Here, try this: and he inscribed a complicated mathematical sequence on the screen of Harry's mind.

Harry looked at it, examining each symbol and number in turn, and it was like trying to fathom an alien language. 'No use,' he said.

Astonishing! Möbius cried. That was a very simple problem, Harry. It appears this disability of yours is serious.

'That's what I've been saying,' Harry tried to be patient. 'And it's why I need your help.'

Only tell me what you would like me to do.

Now Harry's sigh was a glad one, for it seemed that at last he had Möbius's total attention. He quickly told him how Faethor had got into his mind and untangled the connections he'd found there, which had been stimulated into agonizing being each time Harry had attempted to use his deadspeak.

'Faethor was probably the only one who could ever have corrected it,' he explained, 'because it was one of his own sort who'd snarled it up in the first place. And so I got my deadspeak back. But that wasn't the only obstruction Faethor found in there, not by a long shot. The areas governing my basic and instinctive understanding of numbers had been closed off almost entirely. Here's what he discovered: closed doors, barred and bolted — with all my maths locked up behind them. Now Faethor is no mathematician, but still, by sheer force of will he got one of these doors open. Only for a moment, before it slammed shut again, but long enough. And beyond it… the Möbius Continuum! That was too much for him and he got out of there.'