Brian Lumley - Blood Brothers

Lardis believed he did, and a little of his escaped fear crept back in. 'But how… how will you survive?' Unintentionally, he placed some small emphasis on the word 'will'.

Before the other could answer, an echoing chorus of howls floated down out of the hills. With long, loping strides, The Dweller took himself back to the window, again inclining his head to the heights. And to Lardis he said, 'How do they survive, the grey brotherhood?'

'They are hunters,' the Gypsy answered, quietly. 'And will you also… hunt?'

'I know what you are thinking,' The Dweller said. 'And I don't blame you. Your times have been hard. The Wamphyri have made them so. But this I vow: I shall never hunt men.'

Lardis shivered again, but he believed The Dweller's words. 'You are… a changeling creature,' he said. 'I can't pretend to understand you.'

'A changeling, it's true,' The Dweller agreed. 'I had two fathers, only one of which was a man! My human flesh is dying now, but I can feel my vampire at work in me. He remembers his former host, and has other clay to mould.'

There was that in his voice… Lardis was not afraid… but there was weirdness in the air… the moon had turned the garden yellow, with black mountains beyond, split by the deep blue V of the pass. 'I should be going,' the Gypsy said, his normal rumble of a voice little more than a whisper.

'See my hands,' said The Dweller, 'how thin they are, like paws?' He stretched out his arms, until his hands and wrists stood free of the wide cuffs. These I shall retain, as best I can — the hands of a man — to remind me of what I was.' And cocking his head curiously on one side, he glanced at Lardis. 'Also that you and your people shall know me, when I am… other than I am now.'

Lardis looked; The Dweller's hands were pale and slim as a girl's; but his wrists and forearms, what could be seen of them, were grey-furred! Backing towards the door, the Gypsy hissed, 'You, Dweller? A grey one?'

'When they call down from the peaks under the moon like that,' the other sighed, 'ah! — I hear them! And I know they call for me.' He opened the door for Lardis, and the Gypsy tremblingly stepped out into the night.

'I… I knew they were your friends, of course,' he told The Dweller, where now that one stood framed in the doorway. 'But — '

'My friends?' Again that quick tilt of The Dweller's head; his eyes, gleaming now in the eye-holes of his mask, no longer red but feral in moonlight. That and more than that. My kin!'

'Yes,' Lardis gulped, nodded, backed away. 'I understand.'

And as he turned more fully into the garden: 'Lardis,' The Dweller called after him. 'Remember — we shall not hunt you. Be sure that you never hunt me or mine…'

Harry Keogh tossed and turned in tortured dreams. He had been tortured, a little. What his son, The Dweller, had done to him could not have been accomplished by any other means: the Necroscope's metaphysical mind had been entered like a house in the night, its innermost vaults penetrated, its owner deprived of his treasures. The intruder had been none other than Harry Jr himself, called The Dweller, soon to be Harry Wolfson. Except he had stolen nothing, merely changed the combinations on certain locks and booby-trapped certain passageways. During the course of work such as this, inevitably there had been some 'structural' damage which, while he had kept it to a minimum, was the real cause of his father's 'fever'. It was not so much that Harry Keogh's blood was poisoned, rather that his mentality had been depleted.

Harry dreamed of the forbidden Möbius Continuum. Trapped in its flux, he drifted useless as a ship with neither sail nor rudder, a waterlogged hulk rocked and slowly twirled by mathematical tides and algebraic whirlpools, through straits of Pure Number where he was now innumerate. And in the primal darkness of that place beyond or between such places as men are allowed to know, he was aware of a thousand locked doors, all of them drifting with him, around him, even through him, each one of them a mystery to him, closed to him forever. For he was no longer empowered to conjure the Möbius equations which were their keys.

They were doors, yes, to other places, even other times, but without their keys the immensity of the Möbius Continuum might as well be the narrow confines of a dungeon… or the innermost chamber of some sunken Pharaonic tomb, lost forever in the Valley of the Kings.

Such imaginative associations were cyclic and mutative as the stuff of dreams has ever been. Ideas evoked fresh visions as the focus of Harry's dream now shaped itself to this Egyptian motif. So that in the next moment he wondered: Doors? But if these myriad eerily drifting shapes are doors, then why do they look so much like sarcophagi?

Sarcophagi, coffins, caskets: now they were made of glass, allowing him to see into them. And within, all of those teeming dead thousands, the Great Majority, could see out! They could see Harry drifting helplessly by, and soon commenced to shout at him. He saw their mouths working, death's-head jaws grimacing and snapping, the leather of mummied faces cracking where unnatural stress was applied to otherwise inanimate, ex-aminate tissues. They rapped on their glass lids with ivory knuckles, ogled him through empty sockets, waved X-ray hands as he went floating by.

His countless dead friends: they talked to him as of old, questioned him, begged news, items of information, this, that or the other favour. But the ex-Necroscope couldn't hear them and in any case daren't listen, and he knew that he must never ever again try to answer them. Oh, Harry wasn't afraid of the dead and never had been, but he eared, indeed dreaded, their attempted communication with him! For his deadspeak talent had been forbidden to him, even as the most basic numbers were now unknowable. Worse, there would be a penalty to pay: such agony as might easily win him a box of his own!p>

He could only offer them a negative shake of his head (and even then believed he took a risk] as he bobbed heavily along where once he'd skimmed, no longer master but captive of the Mo'bius Continuum. I shouldn't even be here, he told himself. How did I get in here? How will I get out?

As if some One had answered, he saw that the coffins were doors again, one of which opened directly in his path. Offering no resistance (he had none to offer), he was drawn through into another place, another time. Drawn into time itself, but time in reverse! And so Harry began to fall into his own past.

Gathering speed, he was drawn backwards in time like a thread rewinding itself on to its bobbin. Indeed, he watched his own blue life-thread — nothing less than the course and continuity of his fourth-dimensional existence from birth to the grave — streaming back into him as he backtracked years already lived. And the thought occurred: I am going back to my beginnings. I will have it all to live — all to do, all to suffer — all over again!

That was too much. It was the difference between a dream and a nightmare. And Harry Keogh woke up -

— Drenched in his own sweat, and gasping: 'No!'

'Don't!' she told him at once, her voice almost as startled and frightened as his own, but less hoarse. 'You're hurting me.'

'Brenda!' Harry croaked, almost sobbed her name, while at the same time doubting that it was her name, but hoping anyway. Praying that it had all been a dream — and not just this part but all of it, everything — and a moment later knowing that it had not. No, for her fierce breasts, where now on impulse she suddenly hugged his face against them, weren't Brenda's; she didn't smell like Brenda; and anyway he remembered now that the Brenda he'd called out to had been many long years and an entirely different world ago.

'Brenda?' she repeated him, her accent husky, Szgany, as he relaxed his grip on her arms and flopped back into his damp bed. 'Were you dreaming, Harry Dwellersire?' She leaned over him, supported his head with a cool hand, stroked his brow.