Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (82 page)

Finally the picturesque little pub was in view; he spied the place from the crest of a low hill, jumped to a paved service track at the rear, and emerged as from an avenue of tall, fully-clad chestnut trees that made for a perfectly concealed ‘landing.’ A moment more and he had cycled round to the front of the place, parked his machine and entered.

Bonnie Jean was seated at a table in an alcove at one end of the bar. A shame, because it was gloomy; she could have chosen a window seat; but in any case the day was overcast. Maybe she wouldn’t want to climb after all. But no such luck.

He slid into his seat beside her, said, ‘Hello,’ and: ‘It doesn’t look any too hot out.’

‘It’s ideal.’ She gave him a kiss on the cheek. ‘We won’t have the sun in our eyes.’ He couldn’t know that she had been keeping abreast of the weather forecasts and so had been fully aware that there’d be little or no sun from noon today.

They talked, about nothing much in particular, ate a light lunch, and Harry paid the bill. ‘A man of means,’ B.J.

commented.

‘Er, you could say that,’ he answered. ‘I’m solvent again, anyway.’

She pulled a wry face. ‘I wish I could say the same. That place of mine scarcely pays for itself. In fact, I’m in debt.’ Then she bit her lip, for she hadn’t meant to tell him that.

‘How much?’ he asked her.

Too much,’ she told him. Three and a half thousand too much!’ And she sighed and shrugged. ‘It might mean becoming a pub instead of a club after all.’

Harry felt sorry for her, said, ‘Oh, you never know. Something could turn up.’ In a way he felt guilty; for she’d been spending quite a lot of her time, her nights, with him. Well, he certainly had the means to put that right…

The climb B.J. had chosen was further than she had thought; it was some time since she’d been out this way, and never by car. Something like sixty years since the last time she’d practised her climbing here … but the scenery hadn’t changed that much. The place, in the sprawling foothills of Ben Vorlich, was dramatically beautiful: Loch Lubnaig gleamed silver-grey under the low, unseasonal cloud ceiling, and Ben Ledi across the loch was a hazy blue silhouette like a squat mushroom - the bulk of the mountain holding aloft a massive grey cap formed of dirty sky.

‘Shoes,’ B.J. commented, eyeing Harry’s feet as they made their way diagonally across sliding scree to the foot of a jagged rock outcrop that rose almost sheer for a hundred feet, to a saddle between awesomely carved spurs. ‘Boots were better - climbing boots - but as you can see, I don’t wear them either. Anyway, it’s the soles that count. Good, gritty rubber to grip the rock. Boots do protect the ankles, though. You’ll remember, if you get a sprain.’

Thanks,’ Harry told her. Til try not to.’ But, as they arrived below the crag: ‘Are we climbing
this?’

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B.J. grinned at him. ‘For starters,’ she said. ‘But don’t worry - this time next year, this will be like a Sunday afternoon stroll! And anyway, I’ll have you on a rope - this time. So for now, why don’t you just sit there and watch while I get the gear ready? I’ll be a minute or two, that’s all.’

She shrugged out of her pack, turned her back on him, and went down on one knee.

Harry wandered off around the base of a chimney that rose halfway to the summit. Out of sight of B.J., he spoke to his friend in the cemetery in Dalkeith.
How about it?

The other looked out through his eyes, answered:
Damn me, but ah’ve climbed here before! Ben Vorlich, am I right?

Absolutely.

Well, are ye ready?

Harry peeped around the base of the stack. B.J. was still busy with her pack, her back still turned to him.
Yes, why
not?

Off we go then. A piece o’ cake. Just you leave it toe me, Necryscope.

And the Necroscope left it to him - but not entirely. He felt what the dead climber felt, every nuance of the climb.

And of course he learned as they went; for it was his arms and muscles taking the strain, easing him up, ever up within the cleft of the chimney; his eyes scanning the way ahead, taking in each and every detail of the route; his brain, recording it all for later. And the old-timer’s narrative to guide him all the way;

That crack there - a good wee hand hold, three fingers at least. And that split opposite: ye can getye’re toe in there - but mind ye dinnae twist
ye’re foot! and that wee ledge, Necryscope: aye, park ye’re arse right there a moment… but on’y a moment! And alwiz
keep moving - on and up! And breathe, laddie, breathe! For it’s the air that powers ye. Breathe easy, Harry, in and oot. Ah! And
see there: a piton! But dinnae ye
touch
it! That’s cheatin’!

They were through the chimney and onto the outer face, and Harry felt like he was actually haring for the high horizon of the topmost rim. Then he scuffed loose a pebble that went clattering all the way down the sheer face, until it hit the scree and bounced up between B.J.’s legs, where she’d just that instant straightened up from her pack. Laden with a rope, hammer, pitons, she frowned, turned, saw a trickle of dust from above. And she looked up.

Then … she would have called out - in astonishment if for no other reason - but was afraid to do so in case she distracted him. The
idiot!

But ‘the idiot’ was hauling himself up onto the rim, to sit there with his legs dangling, waving down at her! And B.J.

too sat down, with a bump, on the scree, stared up at Harry and for the first time in as long as she could remember felt dizzy - from the angle of her neck, and from the thought of Harry’s ‘solo’ climb: the speed of it!

Then anger replaced her astonishment. The clever bastard! Letting her think he was new to all this!

Quickly, she shed her gear, grabbed her pack, set off back the way they had come. Thus she failed to see Harry reeling on the rim, and almost falling before he could regain his balance. Except it wasn’t him but his guide: the fact that the old climber’s mind had seemed suddenly to go blank, so that the Necroscope had been left alone, as it were, on a knife-edge of vertiginous rock.

Following which …

… The way down took a deal longer, and Harry could feel something of a tremble in his guide’s suddenly uncertain mind. At the bottom he asked him: ‘What was all that about?’

A sick spell,
the other lied.
That’s what stopped me frae climbing, Necryscope: dizzy sickness. Er, vertigo? Aye, and it got me in
the end, sure enough. Ah got dizzy once too often …

‘You fell?’ Harry’s jaw fell open. He couldn’t believe it.

So ah did. But it’s how ah lived; ah cannae complain it’s how ah died, too.

And Harry sighed deeply, closed his eyes and thought:
Now he tells me!
But he kept the thought to himself.

Likewise his guide. He, too, kept his thoughts to himself. The fact that he now knew something of what Harry’s Ma had been talking about. For in fact his ‘attack’ had come when Harry had looked down at Bonnie Jean. The old climber had seen her, too - through the Necroscope’s eyes - that lass who eighty years ago had beaten him up a crag!

Well, and finally he’d got his own back …

By the time Harry reached the car, B.J. had almost, not quite, forgiven him. Her tone was severe as she told him: ‘I’ve a mind to make you cycle home.’

‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ he lied, but in a way told the precise truth. ‘I’ve never done it before. It just seemed - I don’t know - so natural, that’s all. Sort of instinctive?’

And by the time she’d got him home she was half-convinced.

They made love through the evening, but as night came on she had to go. ‘I’ve missed too many Saturday nights,’

she explained. ‘My regulars expect to see me behind the bar.’

But as she kissed him and got into the car, Harry pressed a velvet gift sacklet into her hand. ‘Oh?’ B.J. looked at him curiously, surprised at the weight of his present.

‘It’s very practical,’ he told her. ‘A little something I feel sure you can use.’

And it was. In her room above B.J.’s, she untied the ribbon and turned out the contents onto her bedspread: twenty golden Krugerrands. B.J. knew their value! Her mysterious Mr Keogh certainly

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seemed” to have got his finances sorted out - not to mention hers …

At Le Manse Madonie, the ‘cleansing’ of Guy Cavee’s person had taken all day. He’d been kept fully conscious most of the time - a torture in itself; the Spanish Inquisition could scarcely have been more cruel - and like the Inquisition, at each stage of the process he’d been given the opportunity to confess. If he had been able to tell the Francezcis anything, certainly he would have done so. And in the end he did: let them so much as make a suggestion - he agreed with it. So that even then they couldn’t be sure he was entirely innocent.

But they knew how to
make
sure. In the moment of his absorption into Angelo, the truth would be known. After that

… his mind, or what was left of a mind, would be mainly his own again. But his body -well, there would be no body.

Angelo’s digestive system was that of the Wamphyri carried by his rampant metamorphism to its absolute limits.

Literally absorption: he would not so much ‘digest’ the ex-lieutenant as render him liquid, suck him up like a sponge, add his mass to the bulk of the unthinkable abnormality that was Angelo Francezci, Ferenczini, Ferenczy. A process of simultaneous internal and external homogeniza-tion: to make Cavee as one with the
active
body, the substance, of the pit-thing. The utter and utterly destructive rape and
reduction
of a person to protoplasm of… of a different nature.

But the mind, thoughts, memories, would be there, not alive but incorporated into Angelo’s mentality, giving him something of access, as to a piece of unfeeling computer software. Incorporeal, and therefore unfeeling, yes, but not without emotion and not without memories. Guy Cavee, like all the others before him, would know exactly what was become of him.

As for the thing in the pit: Angelo had been ‘silent’ for hours; even Tony Francezci had heard or sensed nothing of his father since midday. It was possible that the intruder’s tear-gas had entered the Thing’s system, rendering him ill or even unconscious. But his metamorphism -which was all he was now,
a
metamorphism - would have no trouble dealing with that; and his mist, his miasma, rose up from the pit as before.

Tony had tried ‘speaking’ to him, told him what had happened and what he and his brother were doing about it; hoping to bring him round, he had even asked for his advice in the matter - all to no avail. But as the brothers had had the now unconscious Cavee placed on the crane’s platform and swung out over the open pit, Tony had felt a psychic tingle of expectancy and had sensed an incredible hunger; so that he’d known his father was silent for his own reasons.

Therefore, before bringing Cavee awake with an ampule and lowering him into the shaft, Tony had tried one last time:

‘Father, we need to know if this man is a traitor. We need to know who coerced him, turned him against us, against you. I know you are

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hungry, but if he is a dupe we need his thoughts. We need the names in his head.’

Nothing - only the miasma thickening - as the brothers, and their lieutenants and senior thrals, edged back from the mouth of the pit. And then Francesco, ever impatient, stepped forward and broke an ampule under Cavee’s nose, commiting him to hel.

The platform descended; the miasma rose thicker yet; Cavee began screaming as he came awake to his worst nightmare. He was tied down; his screams, denials, confessions, pitiful pleading, couldn’t help him -nothing could. Then the choking, coughing, gurgling, and the soggy splitting sound … like meat wrenched from a bone, or wet leather tearing; and in a little while the mist rising from the mouth of the pit turning pink. Then: AN INNOCENT, their father’s doom-fraught voice rang in the brothers’ minds. MORE INNOCENT THAN THEM WHO LEFT ME DOWN HERE TO CRY

OUT, NOT KNOWING THE WHYS OR WHEREFORES OF IT! THE SAME ONES WHO NOW BEG ME FOR
MY
HELP! …
HAH!
BUT YOU MERELY

SEEK ANSWERS, WHILE I ALREADY HAVE THEM …!

Tony waited awhile, then said: ‘Father, what threatens us threatens you. We need to know, else we can do nothing.’

AH, ANTHONY, MY ANTHONY! AND FRANCESCO; I SEE THAT YOU ARE HERE, TOO. BUT DID YOU NOT

HEAR ME CALLING OUT TO YOU? I CALLED FOR LONG AND LONG. AND DID YOU NOT HEAR THE
NAME
THAT I CALLED?

The brothers glanced at each other, and Francesco finally grunted and said, That again: Radu, Radu,
Radu!
But he’s long gone to earth and won’t be up for a while, if ever. What has he to do with anything?’

OH YOU FOOL! said that awful Voice’ from the pit, quietly but scornfully. WHY, UPON A TIME YOU BROUGHT ME

ONE OF HIS -A GIRL - TO QUESTION HER. I LEARNED A LITTLE; NOT MUCH, BECAUSE UNLIKE
MY
THRALLS, RADU’S THRALLS ARE STRONG. SHE WAS BEGUILED; HER MIND WAS CLOSED; SHE COULDN’T SPEAK. BUT

SHE WAS ONE OF HIS … AND
YOU
TOOK HER!

‘Because you pressured us into believing that when he was up again he’d come looking for us!’ Francesco snarled, displaying his objection to being called a thrall. ‘Because
you
fear this dog-Lord bastard, and transferred your fear to us!’

And after a moment’s silence: FEAR HIM? WHY, I FEAR
EVERYTHING!
TRAPPED DOWN HERE AS I AM, I AM

VULNERABLE! EVEN MY OWN SONS HAVE POWER OVER ME. BUT NOW THERE’S ONE WHO MAY WELL HAVE

POWER OVER ALL OF US.

‘His name?’ Tony was eager now.

Brian Lumley