Necroscope 4: Deadspeak (41 page)

“Ah, my son,” I told him, with nothing of animosity, “but you have already done that. What? I thought you loved me! Indeed, I knew it. And I knew you loved your mother, too—though not how
well
you loved her. And yet what in fact do I know about you, except that you are my son? Very little, it now appears.” And I moved a single pace forward into the cave.

“At least you know I will kill you,” he gasped, backing off, “if you should try to punish me!”

“Punish you?” I let my shoulders slump, shook my head in a sad fashion. “No, I seek only an explanation. You are of my flesh, Janos. What? And shall I punish my own son, now of all times, when of all creatures I am surely the most lonely? Oh, I was angry, be sure, but is that so hard to understand? And what did my rage get me, eh? Your mother is dead now and gone from us, and we are both without her whom we loved so dearly. And now there is no more anger left in me.”

“You don’t… hate me?” he said.

“Hate you? My own son?” Again I shook my head. “It is simply that I do not understand. I desire to
understand
you, Janos. Explain this thing you have done, so that I may know you better.” And I stepped a little deeper inside the cave.

He backed off more yet, but held his spear steady on me. And now, as if a dam had been broken, the words flooded out of him. “I have
hated
you!” he said. “For you were cruel to me, cold, often indifferent, and always … different. I was like you, and yet unlike you. I wanted so much to be like you in my entirety, but could not. Often I’ve watched you become a blanket of flesh to soar like a curling leaf on the air, but when I tried I always fell. I wanted to inspire your fear in the hearts of men, with a glance, a word, a thought; but I was not a vampire and knew that if I tried they would only kill me like any common enemy. So instead I must befriend them whom I despised, get into their minds, make them love me in order to gain their obedience. In myself I looked a little like you, but I could never
be
you, and so I have hated you.”

“You desired to
be
me?” I repeated him.

“Yes, because you have the power!”

“You have powers enough of your own!” I said. “Great powers! Fantastic powers! For which you must thank me. And yet you hid them from me all these years.”

“I did not hide them,” he said, scornfully. “I demonstrated them! I used them to keep you out of my mind and will. And even full-blown they remained secret. You thought my mind was inferior, incapable of knowing your talents and therefore unassailable by them; that I was such a blank—indeed a void—no stylus could ever impress me! So that when you discovered that you couldn’t force yourself upon my mind, you did not say, “Ho, he is strong!” but,
“Hah!
He is weak!” That was your ego, father, which is vast but not infallible.”

“Aye,” I nodded thoughtfully when he was done, “much more to you than I suspected, Janos. You do have certain powers.”

“But not
your
power!” he said. “You are … a changing thing, mysterious, always different. And I am always the same.”

“Well, and there you have it,” I told him, with a shrug. “I am Wamphyri!”

“And I desired to be,” he said, “but was only a strange man. A halfling …”

“But does this excuse you?” I asked him. “Is this reason enough that you should use your own mother as a whore? To hate me for your own deficiencies was one error, but to compound it by cleaving unto—”

“Yes!” he cut me short. “It was my reason. I wanted to be like you and could not, and so hated you. Wherefore I would defile or suborn all that you most treasured. First the Szgany, whom I would cause to love me if not above you then at least as your equal; and then your woman, who knew you better than anyone else in the world—and in ways which only a lover could know you!”

Now (quite deliberately) I backed away from him, and he followed after, towards the mouth of the cave. “In your desire to be like me,” I said, “you determined to do the things I did, and to know the things I knew. Even to the extent of knowing your own mother—carnally?”

“I thought she might… teach me things.”

“What?” I almost laughed, but not quite. “The ways of the flesh, Janos? A father’s task, that, surely?”

“I wanted nothing of you, except to be you.”

“Could you not try to be more affectionate towards me, and so engender my affection?”

His turn to laugh, almost. “What? As well seek sweetness in a lump of salt!”

“You are hard,” I told him, low-voiced. “Perhaps we are not so far apart after all. And so you’d be Wamphyri, eh? Ah, but you’ve much to learn before that day dawns.”

“What?” he said, a look of incredulity crossing his face like a shadow. And again, in a whisper: “What? Are you saying that—?”

“Ah!” I held up a cautionary hand; for now that he was fascinated, I was in a position to cut
him
off. “Aye, not so very far apart at all. And I’ll tell you something, my oh so stupid jealous, impatient son: what you did was no rare thing. Neither vile nor even strange. Not to my thinking, or the thinking of others like me. What, incest? Why, the Wamphyri have ever fucked their own, and in more ways than one! I tell you, Janos: only be
glad
that you were born a man and mainly human. For if you were another vampire … oh, I’d know how best to serve you. Aye, and then you’d know well enow the real meaning of rape!”

My words should have warned him that I was not so forgiving as I seemed, but they did not. I had made him a half-promise, and he wanted the other half—now. “You said … did you mean … can you teach me to be Wamphyri?”

“Something like that,” I answered. And his spear was wavering now where he pointed it at me.

“How would you do it?”

“Not so fast!” I said. “First you must tell me how far you’ve progressed. You have said you desire to be like me. Exactly like me. Which is to say, Wamphyri. Very well, but meanwhile you have practised, am I right? So, and what have you achieved?”

He was sly. “Ask me instead, the things which I have not achieved. All else is mine!”

“Very well: what eludes you?”

“I cannot alter my flesh, change my shape, fly.”

“That is a matter of the will over the flesh—but only if it is Wamphyri flesh. Yours is not. Still… there are ways to change that. What else?”

“You are a crafty necromancer. Once, when a lone traveller passed this way, you murdered him. Hidden in a secret place, I saw you open his body and tease the various parts of him for all of his knowledge of the outside world. You inhaled the gasses of his gut, to learn from them. You sucked his eyes, to see what they had seen. You rubbed the blood of his ruptured ears into your own, to hear what they had heard! Later, when a party of strange Szgany passed by, I stole away a girl child from them and used her in the same way. As you had done, so did I. But I learned nothing and was very ill.”

“The Wamphyri excel in necromancy,” I told him. “Aye, and it’s a rare art. But … even this may be taught. Had I been allowed into your mind, I could have instructed you. In this you thwarted yourself, Janos. Is there anything else?”

“Your great strength,” he said. “I saw you chastise a man. You picked him up and hurled him away like a small log! And I have watched you … in bed. When others would have flagged, your energy was boundless. I used to think she had some secret, Marilena, some ointment or trick to keep you hard. Another reason why I went to her. I desired to know all of your secrets.”

And in my turn, there was something I too had to know. “Did she ever suspect?” I asked him then.

He shook his head. “Not once. My eyes held her entirely in thrall. She knew only what I wanted her to know, did only as I instructed her to do.”

“And you caused her to think that you were me,” I growled, “so that she would hold nothing back!” And I went to grab him.

In that same moment the dog had read my mind. Until then I had kept it shielded from him, but as the thought of him and Marilena together returned to plague me all grip was lost. He saw my thoughts, my intentions, avoided my grasp and lunged at me with his spear.

I was on the rim of the cliff; I ducked to one side and his weapon tore my robe and grazed my shoulder; I wrenched it from him and knocked him in the face with it. His mouth was torn and his teeth broken in. Also, he jerked away from me and slammed his head against the cave’s ceiling. And as he collapsed I caught him up. Dazed, he could do nothing as I carried him to the sheer rim. His head lolled a little but his eyes were open, watching me as I gave way to the vampire within to let its fury shape and reshape my face and form!

“So,” I grunted then, meshing my teeth where they came bursting through the ripped ridges of my jaws. “So, and you would be Wamphyri.” I showed him my hand, which was changed to the talon of a primal beast. “You would be as I am. But I would have you know, Janos, that the only reason you are human
at all
is because of your mother. I wanted her to have a child, and gave her a monster. But you called yourself a halfling and you are right. You are neither one thing nor the other, and no use to man nor beast. You desire flesh you can mould to suit yourself? So be it!” And I gathered up a gob of phlegm, froth and blood onto my forked tongue and hurled it into his gaping mouth, and massaged his throat until it was down. He gagged and choked until his eyes stood out in his face, but there was nothing he could do.

“There!” I laughed at him, madly. “Let that grow in you and form the stretchy flesh you so desire, and make your own flesh like unto itself. Aye, for you’ll need something of the vampire in you—if only to mend all your broken bones!”

And without more ado I hurled him from the cliff…

Janos was sorely broken. All his bones, as I had guaranteed, and his flesh all torn on the rocks. A man, he would have died. But there had always been something of me in him, and now there was even more. What I had spat into him spread faster than a cancer, except that unlike a cancer it spared, indeed saved, his miserable life. He would mend, and live to serve my purpose.

Before I went down into Hungary and headed for Zara, I commanded those Szgany I left behind me: “Tend him well. And when he is mended give him my instructions. He is to stay here and guard my castle and lands, so that when I return there will be a welcome for me. Until then he is the master here, and his will be done. So let it be.”

Then I went to join the Great Crusade, the substance and outcome of which you already know …

As Faethor’s voice tailed away, Harry looked up and all around and saw that the bulldozers were toiling now. Only two hundred yards away an old, raddled relic of a house went down in dust and shuddering debris, and Harry fancied he felt the earth shake a little. Faethor felt it too.

Will they get this far today, do you think?

The Necroscope shook his head. “I shouldn’t think so. In any case they seem to be working at random and don’t appear to be in too much of a hurry. Will it affect you—I mean, when they level this place? There’s not much of it left to level anyway.”

Affect me? No, nothing can do that, for I’m no more. But it may make it damned hard to eavesdrop upon the dead, with all that rumble going on!
And Harry sensed the extinct monster’s hideous grin, as the monster in turn sensed the inevitability of a concrete tomb, probably in the heart of a bustling factory complex. A grin, yes, for Faethor would not accept Harry’s concern, wouldn’t even acknowledge it. Pointless therefore to say:

“Well, I hope you’ll be … OK?” But the Necroscope said it anyway. And quickly, before his (or Faethor’s) embarrassment could show through: “But now I have to get on my way. I’ve learned a lot from you, I think, and of course I’m grateful for the power of deadspeak, which you’ve returned to me. If I may I’ll contact you again, however—by night, of course, and probably from afar—so that you can finish your story. For I know that after the Fourth Crusade you came back to Wallachia and put an end to Thibor, and there must have been more between you and Janos, too. Since he is only recently risen, I know someone must have put him down. You, Faethor, I would suspect.”

He sensed the vampire’s grim nod.

“Well, what was done once may be done a second time, with your assistance.”

You are welcome, Harry, any time. For after all, that is our dual purpose, to return him to dust. And now be on your way. I would like to rest a while in whatever peace is left to me—while I may.

But as Harry took up his holdall, so his feet squelched in the slime of the rotting toadstools. Their “scent” reached him in a single poisonous waft. And:

“Ugh!” He couldn’t hold back the exclamation of detestation. And Faethor picked it up, and perhaps saw in his mind something of the cause.

What?
he said.
Mushrooms?
His mental voice was a little sharp, Harry thought, and suddenly nervous. Perhaps the finality of his situation was affecting him after all.

The Necroscope shrugged. “Mushrooms, toadstools—fungi, anyway. The sun is steaming them away.”

He felt Faethor’s shudder and could have bitten off his tongue. His last sentence had been thoughtlessly cruel. But… what the hell! … why should anyone feel sorry about the fate of a long-dead, morbid and totally evil thing like a vampire?

“Goodbye,” he said, heading out of Faethor’s ruined house, back towards the graveyard and the dusty road beyond.

Farewell,
that unquiet spirit answered him.
And Harry, don’t linger over what you must do but seek to make a quick end of it. Time may well be of the essence.

Harry waited a moment more but Faethor didn’t elaborate …

As Harry climbed the rear wall of the old cemetery and stepped down among the plots and leaning slabs, someone very close to him said:
Harry? Harry Keogh?

He jumped a foot and glanced all around. But … no one there! Of course not, for it was deadspeak at work—without the terrible mental agony he’d come to associate with it. He’d been denied the use of his macabre talent for so long that it would take a little time to get used to it again.