13

First Contact - the Challenge - Thralls

Before he went to sleep, Harry tried again to contact Möbius. It was useless; his deadspeak went out to Möbius's grave in Leipzig, but no one answered. One of the reasons Harry had delayed pursuing Janos was that he'd hoped (hope against hope) to regain his numeracy - and through it access to the Möbius Continuum. This had been his plan but ... it was fading now, possibly into oblivion.

Still worrying about it, eventually he slept.

But his obsession of the moment was carried over into his dreams where, separated from the lesser problems and diversions of the waking world, Harry continued to transmit his thoughts across that Great Dark Gulf which men called Death. Many of the teeming dead in their graves heard him, would answer or comfort him, but dared not. None of them was the one he sought; communication for its own sake would be pointless; they knew that their commiserations, even their inevitable approbations, would only constitute obstructions in Harry's path. For the Necroscope had never been able to refuse conversation with the dead, whose suffering of solitude he alone of all living men understood.

There was one among the dead, however, who - for all that she loved him more than the rest - stood much less in awe of him. Indeed, on a good many occasions she had chided him. The mothers of men are like that.

Harry? her deadspeak touched him. Can you hear me, son?

He sighed and abandoned his search for Möbius. There had been that in her tone which commanded his attention. What is it, Ma?

What is it? (He could picture her frown.) Is that how you speak to me, Harry?

Ma, he sighed again, and tried to explain, I've been busy. And what I'm doing is important. You don't know how important.

Do you think so? she answered. Do you really think I don't know? But who knows you better than me, Harry? Well, I know this much, anyway - that you're wasting your time!

Harry's dreaming mind played with her words and found no explanation for them. Nor would he unless she was willing to supply one. She picked that up at once and flew at him in the closest she'd ever come to a rage. What!? And would you take that attitude? Would you take your impatience out on me? Well, the dead might prize you, but they don't know you like I do. And Harry, you... are ... a ... trouble!

Ma,I -

You, you, you! Always you! And are you the only one? Who is this T you're always mentioning, Harry? And why is it you never speak of 'we'? Why must you always think you're alone? Of all men you are not alone! For a million years men have died and lain silent in the dark, thinking their thoughts and following their solitary designs, each separate from the next but joined in the belief that death was an airless, lightless (oh, yes, and painless too!) but relentless prison... until a small bright light named Harry Keogh came along and said: 'Why don't you talk to me? I'll listen. And then you might like to try talking to each other!' Ahhh! A revelation!

Harry remained silent, didn't know how to answer. Was she praising or chastising him? He had never heard her like this, not even when he was awake. She had never been so angry. And his Ma picked that up, too.

Why am I angry? I don't believe it! For years you couldn't speak to me if you wanted to - not without killing yourself for it and finally when you can speak to me -

Now he believed he understood, and knew that she was right, and hoped he also knew how to deal with it. Ma, he said, the others need to know about me, need to be reassured that there's more than just loneliness in death. And they need to know that there's safety in it, too. From such as Dragosani and the Ferenczys, and others of their sort. But there are so many of the dead - I have so many good friends amongst them - that I can't ever hope to speak to them all. Not until I'm one of them, anyway. But you don't need to know these things because you already know! Yes, and you've always known... that I love you, too, Ma. She was silent.

So if there's ever a time I don't contact you, it's because something very, very important is getting in the way. And Ma, that's the way it's always going to be... Ma?

She was full to the top, which was why she wasn't answering, but at least she wasn't crying. Harry hoped not, anyway. And eventually she said: Oh, I know that, son. It's just that I... I worry about you so. And the dead... they ask after you. Yes, and because they love you they go out of their way for you, too. Don't you know that? Can't you understand that we all want to help?-And don't you know that there are experts among us - in every field - whose talents you're wasting?

What? Wasted talents? The dead wanted to help him?

But didn't they always? What had she been up to? What's that, Ma? he said. About the dead? And what did you mean: I'm wasting my time?

In trying to contact Möbius, that's what I mean, she immediately answered. If only you'd stay in touch you'd know! Why, we've been trying to get hold of Möbius for you ever since you got your deadspeak back!

You what? But... how? Möbius isn't here. He's out there somewhere. He could be anywhere. Literally anywhere!

We know that, she answered, and also that anywhere's a big place. We haven't found him yet. But if and when we do he'll get your message and, we hope, get back to you. Meanwhile you needn't concern yourself about it. You can get on with other things.

Ma, said Harry, you don't understand. Listen: Möbius is probably in the Möbius Continuum. The dead-even the massed thoughts of all the dead - couldn't possibly reach him there. It's a place that isn't of this universe. So you see it's not so much that I'm wasting my time, but that you are wasting yours!

He could sense her shaking her head. And: Son, she said, when Harry Jnr took away your deadspeak and your mathematical intuition, did he also addle your brains?

Eh?

When you use the Möbius Continuum, how much time do you actually spend in it?

And he at once saw that she was right, and wondered: is logic linked with numeracy in the human mind? Has my son diluted my powers of reason, too? No time, he said. It's instantaneous. Möbius wasn't in the Möbius Continuum - he merely used it to get wherever he was going.

Exactly. So why waste your time aiming deadspeak thoughts at his grave in Leipzig, eh? It's like you said: he's out there somewhere. An astronomer in life, death hasn't changed him. So right now there are an awful lot of us directing our thoughts outwards to the stars! And if he's there we'll find him, eventually.

Harry had to give in to her. Ma, what would I do without you?

I was only putting you straight, Harry. Telling you that between times you should get on with other things.

Such as?

Harry, you have access to the most extensive library in the world, books which not only hold knowledge but can also impart it. The minds of the dead are like books for you to read, and their talents are all there to be learned. Just as you learned from Möbius, so you can learn from the rest of us.

But that was something Harry had long ago considered, and long since turned down. Dragosani had learned from the dead, too. Thibor Ferenczy had instructed him - in evil. Likewise, as a necromancer, Dragosani had stolen the talents of Max Batu, and the secrets of the Soviet E-Branch from Gregor Borowitz. And yet none of these things had helped him in the end. Indeed, Batu's evil eye had assisted in his destruction! No, there were certain things, like the future, which Harry preferred not to know. And these thoughts of his were deadspeak, which of course his mother read at once.

Maybe you're right, she said, but still you should keep it in mind. There are talents here, Harry, and if and when you need them they're yours for the asking...

Her voice was fading now, dwindling away into dreams. But at least this time Harry would remember their conversation. And at last, weary now in mind and body both, he relaxed, let go, sank down even deeper into dream and lay suspended there, simply sleeping. For a little while. Until -

Haaarry? It was Möbius! Harry would know his dead-speak anywhere. But even by dreaming standards Mobius's voice was... dreamy. For this was a very different Möbius, a changed Möbius.

August Ferdinand? Is that you? I've been looking for you. I mean, a great many of us have been searching for you everywhere.

I know, Harry. I was... out there. But you were right and they were wrong. I was in the Continuum! For as long as I could bear it, anyway. The thoughts of your dead friends reached me as I emerged.

Harry didn't understand. What's to bear? he asked. The Möbius Continuum is what it is.

Is it? Möbius's voice was still mazed and wandering, like that of a sleepwalker, or a man in some sort of trance. Is it, Harry? Or is it much more than it appears to be? But... it's strange, my boy, so strange. I would have talked to you about it - I wanted to - but you've been away so long, Haaarry.

That wasn't my fault, Harry told him. I couldn't keep in touch, wasn't able to. Something had happened to me - to my deadspeak - and I was cut off from everyone. And that's one of the reasons why I had to contact you now. You see, it's not just that I'd lost my deadspeak, but also my ability to use the Möbius Continuum. And I need it like I never needed it before.

The Continuum? Need it? Still Möbius wasn't entirely himself, far from it. Oh, we all need it, Harry. Indeed, without it there's nothing! It is EVERYTHING! And... and... and I'm sorry, Harry, but I have to go back there.

That's all right, Harry desperately answered, feeling Möbius's deadspeak sliding off at a tangent. And I swear I wouldn't be troubling you if it wasn't absolutely necessary, but-

It... it talks to me! Möbius's voice was an awestruck whisper, drifting, fading as his attention transferred itself elsewhere. And I think I know what it is. The only thing it can be. I have... to ... go... now... Haaarry.

Another moment and he had gone, disappeared, and not even an echo remaining. So that Harry knew Möbius had returned to the one place above all others which was now forbidden to him. Into the Möbius Continuum.

Finally Harry was left alone to sleep out a night which, for all that it was dreamless, was nevertheless uneasy...

The next morning, on their way in Manolis's car to see Trevor Jordan, something which had been bothering Harry suddenly surfaced. 'Manolis,' he said, 'I'm an idiot! I should have thought of it before.'

The Greek glanced at him. 'Thought of what, Harry?'

'The KGB knew I was going to Romania. They knew it almost before I did. I mean, they were waiting for me when I landed - goons of theirs, anyway. So, someone must have told them. Someone here on Rhodes!'

For a moment Manolis looked blank, but then he grinned and slapped his thigh. 'Harry,' he said, 'you are the very strange person with the extremely weird powers - but I think you will never make the policeman! Yesterday, when you told us your story, I thought it was understood that I must arrive at this selfsame conclusion. And of course I did. My next step was to ask myself who knew you were going other than your immediate circle? Answer: no one - except the booking clerk at the airport itself! The local police are looking into it right now. If there is an answer, they will find it.'

'Good!' said Harry. 'But the point I'm making is this: the last thing I want is that someone should be waiting for me in Hungary, too. I mean, if it works out that I must go there.'

Manolis nodded. 'I understand your concern. Let's just hope the local boys turn something up.'

Neither Manolis, Harry, nor Darcy had any way of knowing that at that very moment the police were at the airport, talking to a man who worked on the passenger information desk; to him and to his brother, against whom they'd long entertained certain grudges and suspicions of their own. Talking to them, and not much caring for the answers they were getting, but sure that eventually they'd get the right ones.

At the asylum a Sister met the three and took them to Jordan's room. He had a room now as opposed to a cell: a small place with high, barred windows, and a door with a peephole. The door was locked from the outside; obviously the doctors were still a little wary. The Sister looked through the peephole and smiled, and beckoned Harry forward. He followed her example and looked into the room. Jordan was striding to and fro in the confined space, his hands clasped behind his back. Harry knocked and the other at once stopped pacing and looked up. His face was alive now, alert and expectant.

'Harry?' he called out. 'Is that you?'

'Yes, it is,' Harry answered. 'Just give us a moment.'

The Sister unlocked the door and the three went in. She waited outside.

Inside, Jordan took Darcy's hand and shook it; he slapped Manolis on the back, then stood stock still and slowly smiled Harry a greeting. 'So,' he said, 'and we have the Necroscope back on our team, eh?'

'For a while,' Harry answered, returning his smile. And: 'You scared us, Trevor. We thought he'd wrecked your mind.'

Darcy Clarke, after the initial handshake, had backed off a little, but unobtrusively. Now he mumbled: 'Will you excuse me a moment?' He went back out into the corridor, with Manolis following quickly on behind. In the corridor Darcy was standing beside the Sister - or rather, he was leaning against the wall. And his face was white!

'What is it?' Manolis hissed. 'I've seen that look on your face before.'

'Call Harry out of there,' Darcy whispered. 'Quickly!'

The Sister was beginning to look alarmed but Darcy cautioned her with a ringer to his lips.

'Harry,' Manolis's voice was casual as he leaned back into the room. 'Would you come out here a moment?'

'Do you mind?' Harry lifted an eyebrow, glanced at Jordan.

'Not at all,' the other shook his head and smiled strangely, knowingly. Harry went out to the others.

'What is it?'

Darcy closed the door and turned the key. He looked at Harry and his Adam's apple was working. 'It's all wrong!' he said. 'There's something ... not right with him. In fact nothing's right with him!'

Harry's soulful eyes studied his drawn, trembling face. 'Your talent?'

'Yes. That doesn't feel like Trevor. It looks like him, but it doesn't feel like him. Not to my guardian angel. My talent wouldn't let me stay in there.'

'Harry?' came Jordan's voice from beyond the door. 'What's the delay? Look, I have something to tell you -but only you. Can't we talk, you and I, face to face?'

Manolis was quick off the mark. He showed the Sister his police identification, again warned her to silence as Darcy had done, with a finger to his lips, took out his Beretta and gave that to Harry. And: 'Leave the door ajar behind you, and we'll stay right here,' he said.

'But,' said Darcy, his voice wobbly, 'will that stop him?' He indicated the gun in Harry's hand.

Harry nodded. 'He's not a vampire,' he said. He put the gun into an inside pocket of his jacket, unlocked the door and went through it. Inside the room Jordan had sat down in an armchair. There was another chair facing him and he beckoned Harry to take it. Harry sat down... but carefully, warily, never taking his eyes off the man opposite. 'Well,' he finally said, 'and here I am. So what's the big mystery, Trevor?'

'All of a sudden,' said the other, still smiling his weird, knowing smile, 'you're not so concerned about me.' And Harry noticed how he formed his words slowly, carefully, making sure he got them right.

Right there and then the Necroscope guessed what Jordan's trouble was and decided to put it to the test. 'Oh, I'm concerned about you, all right,' he forced a smile onto his face. 'In fact you wouldn't believe just how concerned I am! Trevor, do you remember what you people at E-Branch used to call Harry Jnr when you looked after him that time?'

The strange, almost insinuating expression slid from Jordan's face. His features went slack and gaunt, his eyes blank, but just for a moment or two. Then... animation returned and he said: 'Oh, of course. The Boss, that's what we called him!'

'That's right - ' Harry nodded, and reached for the gun in his pocket, ' - but you were much too slow in remembering. And you were the one who was always especially fond of him. It's not something you'd need time to think about - or enquire about? - if you were you!'

As his gun started to come into view, so Jordan moved. Previously the man's movements had seemed slow to match his speech... but so are the movements of a chameleon before its tongue flickers into deadly life. And Janos's grip was strong on Jordan's mind. He moved like lightning, his left hand grabbing Harry's throat and his right bearing down on his gun hand, ramming it back inside his jacket. The Necroscope's reflexes took over. As Jordan straightened up from his chair, Harry kicked him hard between the legs... useless, for the mind which controlled Jordan's body simply turned the pain aside. In return, Jordan released Harry's throat and back-handed him with a clenched fist hard as iron! Before his eyes could focus from that, Jordan had lifted him half out of his chair and tried to butt him in the face. In the last moment Harry saw it coming and managed to turn his face aside, but even so the crushing hammer force of the man's head against his temple dazed and shook him. Before he could recover, Jordan let him fall back into his chair and dragged his gun hand into view. Then -

The door burst open and Manolis hurled himself into the room. Darcy was right behind him, defying his leery talent's every effort to turn him back. Grunting his frustration, Jordan tried one last time, without effect, to wrench Harry's gun out of his hand before Manolis hit him. And the compact Greek policeman knew exactly how to hit. He shouldered Jordan back from Harry, drop-kicked him and knocked him down, then scrabbled his hands out from under him where he tried to push himself to his feet.

Then Harry was between them, pointing his gun directly at Jordan's forehead. 'Don't make me!' he shouted at the possessed man, his words sharp as gravel chips. Jordan sat up and snarled at him, at all three of them.

'I was not the one to threaten!' he growled, his voice no longer that of the Jordan they had known. 'You threatened me!'

'That's right,' Harry answered, 'you haven't threatened me personally, not yet, but you would sooner or later... Janos Ferenczy!' He made motions with his gun, indicating that the other should stand up.

Janos, in Jordan's body, did so, and stood glowering at the three who ringed him in. And: 'Well then, Harry Keogh,' he finally grunted, 'and so you know me now. Very well, all subterfuge aside, we meet at last. But I wanted to know you, and I wanted you to know something of my power. You see how easily I have occupied this mind? Telepathy? Hah! Trevor Jordan was the veriest amateur!'

'Your powers don't impress me,' Harry lied. 'The stench from a dead pig is likewise strong!'

'You... you dare!' the other took a pace forward.

Harry gritted his teeth and carefully aimed the gun right between Jordan's eyes -

- And smiling crookedly, the possessed man came to a grudging halt. Then ... he staggered.

Harry narrowed his eyes. 'What...?'

'I ... I have pushed this weakling's flabby body too far,' Janos Ferenczy grunted from Jordan's throat. 'Allow me to sit down.'

'Sit,' Harry told him. And as the other flopped into his chair, and sat there reeling, the Necroscope once more seated himself opposite. 'Now out with it, Janos,' he said. 'Why did you want to see me? To kill me?'

'Kill you?' Janos laughed a baying laugh. 'If I were so desperate to have you dead, believe me you would be dead! But no, I want you alive!'

'Wait!' Manolis came closer. 'Harry, are you saying that this is Janos Ferenczy? Is this really the Vrykoulakas?'

Janos! Jordan scowled at him. 'Greek, you are a fool!'

Manolis moved closer still, but Darcy took his arm. 'It's his mind,' he said, 'his telepathy, controlling Trevor's body.'

'Kill him now!' Manolis said at once.

'That's just it,' Harry answered. 'I wouldn't be killing him but poor Jordan.'

Janos laughed again. 'You are helpless,' he said. 'Why, I could walk out of here! You are like small children!' Then he stopped laughing and scowled at Harry. 'And so you are the all-powerful Necroscope, eh? The man who talks to the dead, the famous vampire-killer. Well, I think you are nothing!'

'Do you?' said Harry. 'And is that why you're here, to tell me that? Fine, so you've told me. Now scurry off back to your Carpathian castle and get your filthy leech's mind out of my friend's head!'

The eyes in Jordan's head glared until they seemed about to leap from their orbits, and his hands trembled where they gripped the arms of the chair. But finally: 'It ... will ... be ... my ... my great pleasure to meet you again, Harry Keogh,' he said, grinding his teeth. 'But man to man, face to face.'

Harry was practised in the ways of the Wamphyri. He knew how to hurl weighty insults. 'Man to man?' he gave a snort of derision. 'You elevate yourself to ridiculous heights, Janos. And face to face? Why, there are cockroaches in this world who stand taller than you!'

Manolis got down on one knee beside Harry's chair, reached for his gun. 'Give it to me,' he said, 'and tell me what you want to know. And believe me, I will make him tell you!'

'I go now - ' Janos said, ' - but I go knowing that you will come to me.' He opened his mouth and laughed, and wriggled his tongue as frantically and obscenely as a madman. 'I know it as surely as I know that tonight - ah tonight. - sweet Sandra will writhe in my bed, lathered with the froth of our fornication!'

He laughed, a great shout of a laugh, and fell limp in his chair. His eyes closed, his head leaned to one side and his jaw fell open. Foam dribbled from one corner of his mouth, and his left arm and hand vibrated a little where they hung down the side of the chair.

Harry, Darcy and Manolis glanced at each other, and at last Harry half-released the Beretta into Manolis's hands - at which Jordan's eyes sprang open! He laughed again and leaped alert, and snatched the gun from between them. And: 'Ah, hah-hah!' he screamed. 'Children, mere children.'

And putting the gun to his right ear, he pulled the trigger.

Harry had drawn back, forcing his chair backwards away from the action, but Darcy and Manolis were sprayed with blood and brains as the left side of Jordan's head flew apart. Yelping their horror, they started upright and back.

Framed in the open doorway, a trio of Sisters of Mercy held their hands to their mouths and gasped. They had seen it all. Or the end of it, anyway. 'Oh, my G-G-God!' Darcy staggered from the room, leaving Harry and Manolis, mouths agape, staring at Jordan's bloody corpse...

Harry and Darcy left Manolis to hand over to the local police (the case was a 'suicide' pure and simple, with plenty of witnesses to prove it) and walked back to their hotel.

It wasn't yet 10:00 a.m. but already it was baking hot; the heat seemed to bounce off the cobbles in the narrow streets of the Old Town; Darcy dumped his bloodied jacket in the back of a refuse truck, and cleaned up as best he could in a drinking fountain along the way.

At the hotel they showered and Harry saw to his bruises, and then for the best part of an hour they sat and did nothing at all ...

A little before noon Manolis joined them. 'What now?' he wanted to know. 'Do we go ahead as planned?'

Harry had been thinking it over. 'Yes and no,' he answered. 'You two go ahead as planned: go to Halki, tomorrow, then Karpathos, and see what you can do. And you'll have the men from E-Branch to back you up from then on in. But I can't wait. I have to square it with that bastard. It was what he said at the end. I can't live with that. It has to be put right.'

'You'll go to Hungary?' Manolis looked washed out, exhausted.

'Yes,' Harry told him. 'See, I thought that after Sandra was taken it wouldn't matter: she'd simply be a vampire, beyond anyone's help. But I hadn't reckoned with how he might use her. Well, it could be that she herself is now past caring, but I'm not. So ... I have to go. Not even for her sake anymore but for mine. I may not any longer have what it takes to get him, but I can't let her go on like that.'

Darcy shook his head. 'Not a good idea, Harry,' he said. 'Look, Janos was goading you, challenging you to take part in a duel he doesn't think you can win. And you've fallen for it. You were right the first time: where Sandra is concerned what's done is done. Now's the time to steady up and start thinking ahead, the time for preparation and planning. But it isn't the time to go off half-cocked and get yourself killed! You know how difficult it's going to be just getting to Janos in the Carpathians; but you also know that if you simply leave him alone, then sooner or later he'll come looking for you where you can meet him on your terms. He'll have to, if he ever again wants to feel safe in the world.'

'Harry,' said Manolis, 'I think maybe Darcy is right. I still don't know why that maniac killed himself and not you, but what you're planning now... it's like putting your head right back in the noose!'

'Darcy probably is right,' Harry agreed, 'but I have to play it how I see it. As for Jordan killing himself: that was Janos, showing me how "powerful" he is! Yes, and hurting me at the same time. But kill me? No, for it's like he said: he wants me alive. I'm the Necroscope; I have strange talents; there are secrets locked up in my head that Janos wants to get at. Oh, he can talk to some of the dead - poor bastards - in that monstrous, necromantic way of his, but he can't command their respect as I do. He'd like to, though, for he's as vain as the rest of them, but he still doesn't feel that he's true Wamphyri. So ... he probably won't be satisfied until he's made himself the most powerful vampire the world's ever seen. And to that end, if he can find some way to steal my skills from me -' He let it tail off ...

And immediately, in a lighter tone, continued:

' - Anyway, you two are going to have plenty on your own plates. So stop worrying about me and start worrying about yourselves. Manolis, how about those spearguns? And I'd also like you to book me a seat on the next plane for Athens - say sometime tomorrow morning? - with a Budapest connection. And Darcy - '

' - Whoa!' said Darcy. 'You changed the subject a bit fast there, Harry. And let's face it, there's really no comparison between what we'll be doing here in the islands and what you'll be going up against in the Carpathians. Also, Manolis and I, we have each other, and by tomorrow night there'll be a gang of us. But you'll be on your own all the way down the line.'

Harry looked at him with those totally honest, incredibly innocent eyes of his and said, 'On my own? Not really, Darcy. I have a great many friends in a great many places, and they've never once let me down.'

Darcy looked at him and thought: God, yes! It's just that I keep forgetting who - what - you are.

Manolis didn't know Harry so well, however. 'Friends?' the Greek said, having missed the point of the exchange. 'In Hungary, Romania?'

Harry looked at him. 'There, too,' he said, and shrugged. 'Wherever.' He stood up. 'I'm going to my room now. I have to try and contact some people...'

'Wherever?' Manolis repeated him, after he had gone.

Darcy nodded, and for all the drowsy Mediterranean heat he shivered. 'Harry's friends are legion,' he explained. 'Right across the world, the graveyards are full of them.'

Harry tried again to contact Möbius, with as little success as the teeming dead allies whom his Ma had recruited to that same task. He tried to speak with Faethor, too - to check on a certain piece of advice that the extinct vampire had given him, which now seemed highly suspect - and was likewise frustrated; it must be the scorching heat of the midday sun, shimmering in Romania just as it shimmered here, which deterred Faethor's Wamphyri spirit. Disappointed, finally Harry reached out with his thoughts to touch the Rhodes asylum, where Trevor Jordan now lay in the morgue, peaceful in the wake of his travails and well beyond the torments of the merely physical world. There, at last, he was successful.

Is that you, Harry? Jordan's dead voice was at first tinged with anxiety, then relief as he saw that he was correct. But of course it is, for who else could it be? And eagerly: Harry, I'm glad you've come. I want you to know that it wasn't me. I mean, that I could never have -

' - Of course you couldn't!' Harry cut him off, speaking out loud, as he was wont to do when time, circumstance and location permitted. 'I know that, Trevor. It's one of the reasons I wanted to speak to you: to put your mind at rest and let you know that we understand. It was Janos, using you to relay his thoughts - and that one godawful action - through to us. But,' (he was as frank as ever), 'it's a damned shame he had to murder you to be doubly sure I'd go after him!'

Harry, said Jordan, it's done now and 1 know it can't be reversed. Oh, I suppose it will get to me later, when it sinks in how much I've lost. I suppose they - I mean we - all have to go through that. But right now I'm only interested in revenge. And let's face it, I haven't fared as badly as some. God knows I'd rather be dead than undead, in thrall to that monster!

'Like poor Ken Layard.'

Yes, like Ken. And Harry felt the dead man's shudder.

'That's something else I have to try to put right,' the Necroscope sighed. 'Ken belongs to Janos now, his locator. But Trevor, Sandra is his, too...'

For a moment there was only a blank, horrified silence. Then: Oh, God, Harry... I'm so sorry!

Harry felt the other's commiserations, nodded, said nothing. And:

God, it seems impossible! Jordan finally said, speaking to himself as much as to Harry. We came out to Greece to find a few drugs - and look what we found. Death, destruction, and a one-man plague who can burst out any time he's ready. And powerful? It's like Yulian Bodescu was a pocket-torch compared to a laser beam. You know, I scanned him by mistake? I was like a tiny spider who fell in a bathful of water, and some bastard pulled the plug! There was no fighting him. Harry, his mind is a great black irresistible whirlpool. And little old me?... I dived right in there head-first!

'That's the other thing I want to talk to you about,' Harry told him. 'This control he had over you, even at a distance. I mean, how could such a thing come about? You were a powerful telepath in your own right.'

Therein lies a tale, Jordan answered, bitterly. And: Harry, we're all of us like radio stations: our minds, I mean. Most of us operate on very personal channels, our own. We only talk to ourselves. We think to ourselves. Most of us. Telepaths, on the other hand, have this knack of tuning in to other people's wavelengths. But Janos is a superior and far more sophisticated station. Only let someone pick up his wavelength and he jams their transmission, tracks the signal home and literally takes over! The stronger their beam, the faster he homes in on them. Yes, and the harder they fall. It's as simple as that.

'You mean he got to you because you're a telepath? Ordinary people would be safe, then?'

I can't answer yes for a certainty, but I would think so. But one thing I am certain of: with a mind like that he has to be a powerful hypnotist, too. In fact he'll have all the usual - the unusual? - mental powers of the Wamphyri in spades!

'So I've been told,' Harry nodded, gloomily. 'It makes a nonsense of something Faethor said to me.'

Faethor? You've been talking to that black-hearted bastard again? Harry, he was Janos's father!

'I know that,' said Harry. 'But if you don't speak to them you can't know them. And that's my best weapon: knowing them.'

Well, I suppose you know best what you're doing. But Harry, never let him into your mind. Be sure to keep the bastard out of your mind. Because once he's in he's in for good!

Which was the opposite of the advice Faethor had given him. 'I'll keep that in mind,' said Harry, but artlessly, without humour. And: 'Trevor, is there anything I can do for you? Any messages?'

I've left a few friends behind. Given time I'll think of a couple of things to say. Not right now, though. Maybe you can get back to me. I hope so, anyway.

Trevor, you were a telepath in life. Well, it doesn't stop there. You won't be alone, ever. See if I'm not right. And there's one last thing.'

Yes?

'I... I want to make sure you're cremated. And then, if everything works out, I think I'd like to keep your ashes.'

Harry, said Jordan in a little while, did anyone ever tell you you're morbid? Then he actually laughed, however shakily. Hell, I don't care what happens to my ashes! Though I suppose I'd get to talk to you more often, right? I mean, from your mantelpiece?

Harry had to grin to keep from crying. 'I suppose you would,' he said. .

By mid-afternoon things were starting to shape up. Harry still couldn't contact Möbius or Faethor, but Manolis and Darcy returned from an outing in the town with an armful of spearguns. They were the Italian 'Champion' models Manolis had recommended, with very powerful single rubber propulsion.

'I once saw a man accidentally shot in the thigh with one of these,' the Greek related. 'They had to open his leg up and cut the harpoon head right out of him! Our harpoons are being silvered right now. We pick them up tonight.'

'And my flight to Athens?' Harry's resolve was as strong as ever.

Manolis sighed. 'Same as last time. Tomorrow at 2:30. If there's no trouble with your connection, you'll be in Budapest by, oh, around 6:45. But we both wish you'd change your mind.'

'That's right,' Darcy agreed. 'Tomorrow night our people from E-Branch will be out here. And they're trying to contact Zek Foener and Jazz Simmons in Zakinthos to see if they'd like to be in on it. We'll have a hell of a good team, Harry. There's absolutely no reason why you should go off to Hungary on your own. Someone could go with you at least part of the way. A good telepath or prognosticator, say.'

'Zek Foener?' Harry had turned to look sharply, frowningly at Darcy on hearing her name spoken. 'And Michael Simmons? Oh, they'll want to be in on it, all right!' So far there'd been no chance to report what Trevor Jordan had told him about the vampire's superior ESP; now he did so, and finished up:

'Don't you realize who and what Zek Foener is? Only one of the most proficient telepaths in the world. Just let her mind so much as scrape up against Janos's and he'd have her! And as for Jazz ... he was a hell of a man to have around on Starside, but this isn't Starside. The fact is I daren't take any of our talented people up against Janos. He'd just take them out one by one and use them for his own. I mean, this is the very essence of why I have to handle my side of it alone. Too many good people have lived through too much already just to go risking their necks again now.'

'You're right, of course,' Darcy nodded. 'But you're our best chance, Harry, our best shot. Which makes it doubly frustrating to simply say nothing and let you go risking your neck! I mean, without you... why, we'd be left stumbling around in the dark!' Which seemed to say a lot for what he thought of Harry's chances. But:

'I won't argue with you,' Harry said, quietly. 'I'm on my own.' And his voice held a note of finality, and of a determination which wouldn't be swayed...

They hadn't eaten; that evening they went out to pick up their silvered harpoons and on the way back stopped off at a taverna for a meal and a drink. They ate in silence for a while, until Darcy said: 'It's all boiling up, I can feel it. My talent wishes to hell tomorrow wasn't coming, but it knows it is.'

Harry looked up from his large, rare steak. 'Let's just get through the night first, right?' There was a growl in his voice that Darcy wasn't used to. It had a hard, unaccustomed edge to it. Tension, he supposed, nerves. But who could blame Harry for that?

Harry couldn't know it but he wasn't going to have a good night. Asleep almost before his head hit the pillows, he was at once assailed by strange dreams: 'real' dreams in the main, but vague and shadowy things which he probably wouldn't remember in the waking world.

Ever since his Necroscope talents had developed as a child, Harry had known two sorts of dreams. 'Real' dreams, the subconscious reshuffling of events and memories from the waking world, which anyone might experience, and metaphysical 'messages' in the form of warnings, omens and occasionally visions or glimpses of real events long since over and done with and others yet to come. The latter had presaged his developing dead-speak, enabling the dead in their graves to infiltrate his sleeping mind. He had learned to separate the two types, to know which ones were important and should be remembered, and which to discard as meaningless. Occasionally they would overlap, however, when a conversation with a dead friend might drift into a 'real' dream or nightmare - such as when his Ma had become a shrieking vampire! Or it might just as easily work the other way, when a troubled dream would be soothed by the intervention of a dead friend.

Tonight he would experience both types separate and intermingled, and all of them nightmarish.

They started innocuously enough, but as the night progressed so he began to feel a certain mental oppression. If anyone had shared his room, they would have seen him tossing and turning as the weird clearing-house of his mind set up a series of strange scenarios.

Eventually Harry's struggles wearied him and he drifted more deeply into dreams, and as was often the case soon found himself in a benighted graveyard. This was not in itself ominous: he need only declare himself and he knew he'd find friends here. Contrary as dreams are, however, he made no effort to identify himself but instead wandered among the weed-grown plots and leaning headstones, all silvered under the moon.

There was a ground mist which lapped at the humped roots of stunted trees and turned the well-trodden, compacted paths between plots to writhing ribbons of milk. Harry picked his way silently beneath the lunar lamp, and the mist curled almost tangibly about his ankles.

Then... suddenly he knew he was not alone in this place, and he sensed such a coldness and a silent horror as he'd never before known in any cemetery. He held his breath and listened, but even the beat of his own heart seemed stilled in this now terrible place. And in the next moment he knew why it was terrible. It wasn't just the preternatural cold and the silence, but the nature of the silence.

The dead themselves were silent... they lay petrified in their graves, in terror of something which had come among them. But what?

Harry wanted to flee the place, felt an unaccustomed urge to distance himself from what should be (to him) a sure haven in an uncertain dream landscape; but at the same time he was drawn towards a mist-shrouded corner of the graveyard, where rubbery vegetation grew green and lush and damp from the coiling vapours.

The vapours of the tomb, he thought, like the cold breath of the dead, leaking upwards from all of these graves! It was an unusual thought, for Harry knew that there was no life in death... was there?

No, of course not, for the two conditions of Man were quite separate: the living and the dead, distinct from each other as the two faces of a fathomless gorge, and Harry the only living person with the power to bridge the gap.

Oh? And what of the undead?

Something squelched underfoot with a sound like bursting bladders of seaweed, and Harry looked down. He stood at the very rim of the rank vegetation, beyond which unnatural mists boiled upwards presumably from some untended tomb. And at his feet ... a cluster of small black mushrooms or puffballs, releasing their scarlet spores even as he stepped amongst them.

Whose grave was it, he wondered, out of which these fungi siphoned their putrid nourishment? He passed in through a curtain of damp, clinging green, where heavy leaves and clutching creepers seemed reluctant to admit him; but emerging from the other side ... it was as if he'd passed into an entirely different region!

No mausoleum here. No leaning, lichened tombstones or weedy plots but ... a morass?

A swamp, yes. Harry stood on the rim of a vast, misted expanse of quag, rotting trees and rank vines; and all around, wherever there was semi-solid ground, the wrinkled black toadstools grew in diseased, ugly clumps, releasing their drifting red spores.

He moved to turn, retreat, retrace his steps, only to discover himself rooted to the spot, fascinated by a sudden commotion in the leprous grey mire. Directly to the fore, the quag was shuddering, forming slow doughy ripples as if something huge stirred just below the surface, causing vile black bubbles to rise and belch and release their gases.

And in another moment, up from the depths of the bog rose ... the steaming slab of a headstone, complete with its own rectangular plot of hideously quaking earth!

Until now, however unquiet, Harry's dream had been languid as a strange slow-motion ballet - but the rest of it came with nerve-shattering speed and ferocity.

Longing to turn and run but still rooted there, he could only watch as the mush of the bog slopped from the thrusting headstone and dripped from the rim of the risen tomb to reveal its true nature... indeed to reveal the identity of its dweller! The legend carved in the slab where the oozing quag gurgled from its grooves was hardly unfamiliar. It said, quite simply:

HARRY KEOGH: NECROSCOPE

Then-

The mound of the burial plot burst open, hurling great clods of earth in all directions! And lying there in that open grave, like some morbid parasite in a wound, a semblance or grotesque caricature of Harry himself... but festooned in all its parts with ripening, spore-bearing mushrooms!

Harry tried to scream and had no mouth; his likeness did the job for him; with a monstrous grunt it sat up in its gaping tomb, opened its yellow, pus-filled eyes, and screamed until it rotted down into a gurgling black stump!

Harry put up a hand before his eyes to ward off the sight of the thing... and his hand was covered with black nodules, like monstrous melanomas, growing and sprouting from his flesh even as he stared aghast! And now he saw why he couldn't run: because he was rooted to the spot, was himself a hybrid fungus thing, whose tendril toes had hooked themselves into the bank of rotting soil above the quivering swamp!

He turned up his face to the moon and screamed then, not with his puffball-spewing mouth but with his mind:

Christ! Oh, Christ! Oh, Christ! And before the dry-rot fungus webbing crawled over his eyes to seal them, too, he saw that in fact the moon was a skull which laughed at him from a sky of blood! But before the sky could rain its red on him, the moon-skull reached down skeletal arms to gather him up, draw him from the sucking swamp and refashion his limbs back into a man-shape. And:

Haarrry! the moon sang to him with Sandra's voice. Harry! Oh, why don't you answer me?

The old dream receded apace with the new one's advance. Harry tossed in his bed and sweated, and sent out tremulous deadspeak thoughts into the dark of the night. But:

No, no, Harry, came Sandra's urgent mental voice again. I don't need that for I'm not dead. Better if I were, perhaps, but I'm not. And only look at me now, Harry, only look at me now!

He forced open his squeezed-shut eyes and looked, and tried to accept the strangeness of what he saw.

The scene itself was weird and Gothic, and yet Harry knew the people in it well enough. Sandra, striding to and fro, to and fro, wringing her hands and tearing her hair; and Ken Layard, hunched over a wooden table, strangely slumped and crooked where he crushed his head between taloned hands and gazed feverishly on the unguessed caverns of his own mind. Sandra the telepath, and Layard the locator. Janos's creatures now.

In their entirety?

Harry was immaterial, incorporeal, without body. He knew it at once, that same non-feeling of unbeing which had been his lot in the strange times between the death of the physical Harry Keogh and his mind's incorporation with the brain-dead Alec Kyle. He was here not in the flesh but in spirit alone. Incredible, indeed impossible outside the scope of dreams and without the aid of the metaphysical Möbius Continuum. And yet with his Necroscope's instinct, Harry knew that this was more than just a dream.

He examined his surroundings.

A huge bedchamber of a room, with a massive four-poster in an arched-over recess in a raw stone wall. Other than this the room contained a low cot with a straw-stuffed mattress and mouldy blankets, wide wooden chairs and a rough table, a great fireplace and blackened flue, and ancient tapestries rotting on the gaunt stone walls. There were no windows and only one door, which was of massive oak and iron-banded. It was closed and displayed neither doorknob nor handle; Harry guessed it would be bolted and barred from the outside.

The only light came from a pair of squat candles wax-welded to the table where Layard sat hunched in his fever of concentration; they illuminated flickeringly a vaulted ceiling, with nitre crystals crusted in the mortar between massively carved keystone blocks. The floor was of stone flags, the atmosphere cold and unwelcoming, the entire scene fraught with the menace of a dungeon. The place was a dungeon, or as close as made no difference.

A dungeon in the ruined castle of the Ferenczy.

'Harry?' Sandra's voice was a hushed, frightened whisper, kept low for fear of alerting... someone. She stopped pacing and hugged herself tightly as an involuntary shudder of terror - and then of sudden awareness -racked her body. Her mouth fell open in a gasp and she strained her face forward, staring at nothing. 'Harry, is that... you?'

Ken Layard at once looked up and said: 'Do you have him?' His face was gaunt, twisted from some unbearable agony, with cold sweat standing on his brow. But as he spoke, the scene began to waver and Harry, however unwillingly, to withdraw.

'Don't let it slip]' Sandra hissed. She rushed to the table, caught Layard's head in her hands, lent her will to his in bolstering whatever extrasensory feat it was which he performed. And the room grew solid again, and at last the incorporeal Necroscope understood.

As yet they were not entirely in Janos's thrall. They were his, yes, but he must needs watch them, lock them up when he himself was not close by ... like now. And because they knew they were doomed to his service as undead vampires, so they combined their ESP in this one last effort to defy him, while still their minds were at least in part their own. Layard had used his talent to locate and 'fix' Harry in his bed in a Rhodes hotel, and Sandra had followed Layard's co-ordinates to engage the Necroscope in telepathic communication. But with their powers enhanced or amplified by the vampire stuff Janos had put into them, they had succeeded above their expectations. They had not only sought Harry out and contacted him, but given him telepathic and visual access to their dungeon prison!

Sandra was dressed in some gauzy shift which let the light of the candles strike right through; she wore neither shoes nor underclothes; there were dark, angry blotches on her breasts and buttocks which could only be bruises. Layard's attire was little more substantial: a coarse blanket which he'd belted into a sort of cassock. It would be bitterly cold down there in the secret core of the old castle, but Harry rightly supposed that the cold no longer affected them.

'Harry! Harry!' she hissed again, turning her gaze directly towards his unbodied presence where he viewed them. 'Harry, I know we have you! So why don't you answer me?' Her fear and frustration were obvious in the huge orbs of her eyes.

'You... you have me,' he finally spoke up. 'It took a moment to get used to, that's all.'

'Harry!' her gasp made a plume of mist in the cold air. 'My God, we really do have you!'

'Sandra,' he said, more animated now, 'I'm asleep and, well, dreaming, sort of. But I can wake up, or be woken up, at any time. After that... we might still be in contact and we might not. You've done this - got in touch with me - for a reason, so now it would be better if you just got on with it.'

His words - so cold, distant, empty - seemed to stun her. He wasn't how she'd expected him to be. She went to the table and flopped into a chair alongside Layard. 'Harry,' she said, 'I've been used, changed, poisoned. If you've ever loved me - especially feeling what you'd be feeling for me now - then I know you'd be screaming. And Harry, you're not screaming.'

'I'm feeling nothing,' he said. 'I daren't feel anything! I'm talking to you, that's all, but without looking inside. Don't ask me to look inside, too, Sandra.'

She put her head in her hands and sobbed raggedly. 'Cold, so cold. Were you ever, ever in your life warm, Harry?'

'Sandra,' he said, 'you're a vampire. And though you probably don't know it, you're already displaying the traits of a vampire. They rarely converse but play word-games. They play on emotions they don't themselves share or understand, such as love, honesty, honour. And others which they understand only too well, like hate and lust. They seek to confuse issues, and so blunt the minds of their opponents. And to a vampire each and every other creature who is not a thrall is an opponent. You sought me out, doubtless because you had important things to tell me, but now the vampire in you delays and distracts you, causes you to deviate from your course.'

'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!'