The Source (49 page)

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Authors: Brian Lumley

BOOK: The Source
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“But what's happened?”
“Murder—at least I think so.”
“But don't you know?” Luchov gaped.
“I know two people are dead, and if their killer is human, then it's murder.”
Luchov was waking up quickly. “Is it
that
bad? Have you checked with Fail—”
“Yes,” Khuv cut him short. “To both questions.”
“But—”
“No buts,” Khuv interrupted again. “If it's something from the Gate, then it's invisible.”
At that moment Litve returned with Agursky. Khuv's eyes went straight to the tiny scientist. Except … Agursky hardly seemed that small any more. He
slumped
a little, yes, but if he were to stand up straight …
Agursky had on his night things with a dressing-gown thrown over them. And he was wearing dark spectacles. “Something wrong with your eyes?” Khuv frowned.
“Eh?” Agursky squinted, peered at the Major through tinted lenses. “Oh, yes. It comes on now and then. Photophobia. It's with being down here, out of the natural light. All this artificial lighting.”
Khuv nodded. He had more than enough with which to concern himself without worrying about Agursky's weirdness. “In there,” he nodded, indicating the door to Roborov's room. “Two dead men.”
Agursky seemed hardly concerned. He opened the door, made to go in. Khuv caught his arm, felt the tension in him. Strange, because it hadn't shown in his movements or his mannerisms. “I want you to tell me what killed them, if you can. Give me some sort of idea, anyway. Gustav, go in there with him.”
While they were inside the room, Khuv told Luchov all he knew. Impossible to work if the Projekt Direktor was going to be prying into everything. Better to put him firmly in the picture right now, from square one. By the time he was through, Litve and Agursky had come back out of the room. Litve was still very pale; Agursky seemed his usual self.
“Any ideas?” Khuv asked him.
The other shook his head, averted his eyes. “Something terrifically strong. Immensely strong. A beast, certainly.”
“Beast?” Luchov blurted.
Agursky glanced at him. “In a way of speaking, Direktor, yes. A human beast. A murderer. But as I said, a very large, very strong man.”
Khuv said: “And the teeth marks in Roborov's skull?”
“No,” Agursky shook his head. “His skull was smashed in with a hammer or something very similar. Yes, something like a small-pane hammer. But wielded with considerable force.”
Remembering that garbage Savinkov had spewed out, Khuv scowled. “But I have an esper,” he said, “Paul Savinkov, who says he ‘saw' the killer. And he says it was something nightmarish!”
Agursky had started to turn away, but now he slowly turned back. “He
saw
this happen, you say?”
“In his mind, yes.”
“Ah!” Agursky nodded his understanding. Then he smiled, shrugged half-apologetically. “Well,
my
science takes note of physical evidence only, Major. Metaphysics isn't my scene. Will you be requiring me any more? I have many things to do now, and—”
“Only one more thing,” said Khuv. “Tell me, what did you do with the corpse of the dead creature from the tank?”
“Do with it? I photographed it, studied it to the point of stripping it down to cartilage and bone, finally destroyed, burned it.”
“Burned it?”
Agursky shrugged again. “Of course. It was from the Gate, after all. There was nothing else to be learned from it. And … best not to take chances with things like that, don't you agree?”
Luchov patted him on the shoulder. “Of course, Vasily, of course we do. Thank you very much.”
“If we do want you,” Khuv called after him, “you'll be hearing from me. But with any luck we won't.” To Luchov he said, “God, he gives me the creeps!”
“This whole place,” Luchov muttered, “gives
me
the creeps!”
As Agursky went off, so Savinkov returned with Khuv's KGB operatives. They'd had civil police training, and since this now appeared to be a case of routine murder …
Khuv scowled at them. They looked ruffled, unshaven. He dressed them down, told them what had happened and what he wanted. They went into Roborov's room. By now Savinkov had disappeared, probably sneaked off before Khuv could find more work for him.
But as Khuv and Luchov made to return to the upper levels, so the telepath came back. He was reeling, sobbing, seemed totally uncoordinated. “Major—help! I … I … oh,
God!
”
Khuv pounced on him, grated: “What now, Paul?”
“It's Leo!” he gasped.
“Leo Grenzel?” The locator! “What is it with Leo?”
“I wondered why he hadn't picked up the presence of the intruder,” Savinkov babbled, “and so I went to his room. The door was … it was open. I went in, and … and …”
Khuv and Luchov looked at each other. Their expressions were much the same: shock, disbelief, horror! Savinkov's reasoning was faultless, of course: Grenzel, if he was awake and well, should have appeared on the scene long before now.
Leaving Savinkov leaning against the metal wall, sobbing, Khuv and Luchov set off down the corridor at a run. Khuv called back: “No alarms, Paul! Only set them off one more time and the entire Projekt will take flight!”
In Grenzel's room it was a repeat of the same story. His spine had been broken, looked bitten through to the marrow and spinal cord. His sharp features seemed even sharper in death, and his huge, bulging eyes an even deeper shade of grey.
What had those esper's eyes of his seen before he died, Khuv wondered? And then he stilled the bobbing of his Adam's-apple and staggered out of the room, until he was no longer able to hear Luchov's throwing up into Grenzel's toilet …
 
The Dweller's garden was a marvellous place.
It was a miniature valley, a gently hollowed “pocket” at the rear of a saddle in the mid-western reach of the mountains. In extent the garden was something a little more than three acres in a row, with the length of its rear boundary against the final rise of the saddle, and its frontage where the saddle started to dip toward frowning cliffs. A low wall had been built there, to keep people from moving too close. In between there were small fields or allotments, greenhouses and a scattering of clearwater ponds. One of the ponds swarmed with rainbow trout, while some of the others bubbled with heat from thermal activity deep in the ground; hot springs, in fact.
Because of the abundance of water the place was lush with vegetation, but only a handful of species were unknown to Earth. The rest of the flowers, shrubs, trees
in the garden would have been perfectly at home in any English garden. Harry Jr.'s mother tended them, when she felt up to it. But usually his Travellers looked after the garden, as they looked after almost everything here.
Harry Jr.'s bungalow house was centrally situated, built of white stone with a red tile roof, its front perched over the wide mouth of a well that occasionally gave off streamers of steam. He swam and bathed in the pool regularly. His Travellers (no longer true Travellers, in fact, for they were permanent dwellers here themselves now) inhabited similarly constructed stone houses at the sides of the saddle, where the level ground met rising cliffs. All such homes were centrally heated, with a system of plastic pipes carrying hot water from a deep, gurgling blowhole. They had glass windows, too, and other refinements utterly unheard of before Harry Jr.'s time.
The Dweller (as all of his tenants insisted on calling him) had built greenhouses in which to grow an abundance of vegetable produce. Heated and watered from the springs, his crops were amazing. Also, he had found ways round the long, cold, dark sundowns. Plant species which would adapt already had, but others which wouldn't received artificial sunlight. The permanently running water drove his generators (small but incredibly powerful machines such as Harry senior had never seen or even dreamed of before), which in turn powered ultraviolet lamps in the greenhouses—
and
electric lights in the houses!
“You've done … so
much!
” Harry Keogh told his son, where he walked with him along the edge of a plot shady with sweet corn grown tall. “All of this is nothing short of … astonishing!”
Harry Jr. had heard much the same thing from Zek Föener, Jazz Simmons, every Traveller who ever made it here; it was a common reaction to things he'd come to take for granted. “Not really,” he answered. “Not set against what I'm capable of doing. Chiefly I wanted
a place to live, for myself and for my mother. So it had to be
made
liveable. And what is it really but a strip of fertile soil some two hundred or more yards long by eighty wide, eh? As for the running of the place, the Travellers do that for me.”
“But the buildings,” Harry said, as he'd said it so often during the course of the past sunup. “Oh, I know they're only bungalows, but they're so, well, beautiful! They're simple but delightful. The great span of their arches, the delicate buttresses, the cut of the roof timbers. They're not Greek, not anything I can put a finger on, just
so
pleasing. And all built by these … well, by these cave-dwellers of yours!”
“The trogs are people, father,” Harry Jr. smiled. “But the Wamphyri never gave them a chance to develop, that's all. They're no more primitive than your Australian bushmen, all considered. But on the other hand they're eager to learn. Show them a principle or a system and they catch on quick. Also, they're grateful. Their old gods didn't treat them too well, and I do. As for the architecture which so impresses you: well, that surprises me. Surely you realize that I'm not the designer? I got all this from a Berliner who died back in 1933. A Bauhaus student who never did make it when he was alive, but he's designed some beautiful stuff since then. I'm a Necroscope, like you, remember? All of the very simple, very efficient systems you see in use here were given to me by the dead of your own world! Don't you realize how far you could have gone, the things
you
could have done, if you hadn't spent the last eight years of your life tracking me?”
Harry shook his head, still a little dazed by what his son had shown him, by what he'd been told. “See,” he finally said, perhaps a little desperately, “that's another thing. Eight years, you said. Now, in my mind you're a boy, an eight-year-old boy. In fact I've prided myself in picturing you that way, in imagining what you'd be like. It would have been far easier to think of you as a
baby, which is how I remember you. But I made myself see you as you'd be now—or as I thought you'd be. And … and just look how you are! I still can't get over it.” He shook his head again.
“I've explained that.”
“What, how you tricked me?” Harry didn't try to disguise the bitterness in his tone. “How you not only crossed the divide between universes but displaced yourself in time, too? You went back in time! Long before you were born, and long before I lost you, while
I
was growing up
you
were growing up too—here! Just exactly how old are you, anyway?”
“I'm twenty-four, Harry.”
Harry nodded, sharply. “Your mother's now fifteen years my senior! Not that she'd recognize me, anyway. And … and you
have
looked after her. That was always one of my biggest worries: that she be looked after. But through all of those years I didn't know! Couldn't you have let me know, just once?”
“And prolong the agony, Harry? So that you'd always be there, just one step behind us?”
Harry grimaced, turned away. “I noticed you've skipped the ‘father' bit, too. You're a man, not the boy I expected. You wear that damned golden mask, so that I can't even see your face. You're … a stranger! Yes, we're like strangers. Well, I suppose that's the way it had to be. I mean, we're hardly father and son, are we? Let's face it, I'm not all that much older than you, now am I?”
Harry Jr. sighed. “I know I've hurt you. I knew it all the time you were chasing me.”
“But you kept running?”
“I might have come back, but … oh, there were a lot of things. Mother wasn't improving; there were good places I could take her, where she'd be happy; many reasons for not coming back. One day you'll understand.”
Harry felt something of his son's sadness. Yes, there
was a sadness in him. He nodded again, but not so sharply now. For long moments he wrestled with his emotions. In the end blood won. “Anyway,” he relaxed, took a deep breath, somehow managed to grin, “just how
did
you do it?”
Harry Jr. had felt the tension go out of his father, knew he'd been forgiven. He, too, relaxed. “Time-travel, you mean? But you did it too, and long before me—relatively speaking.”

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