Even the remnants of the conversation were fading now!
Frantic, Harry searched his mind. Numbers, solar heat, and grave-cold. Mordant acids, dead friends, and alchemical thunder. Stakes, and fires, and knives. Only one possible meaning there! Or was all of this simply a dream within a dream, the echo of a nightmare from the past? Or were his problems—the worst sort of problems?
A dire place with golden bells? Did he know such a place? A mutant Thing in a pit, the father of blood brothers. Or brothers of blood?
Hell and damnation! It was all slipping away!
He ran back to the church. Songs of praise echoed within. “Nostradamus!” he called. And twice more: “Nostradamus! Nostradamus!” But the great prophet wasn’t listening. Perhaps he was singing, too. Or perhaps his mind was already winging far into future times …
Back in the old house near Edinburgh, Harry sweated like a man in a fever trying to remember what he’d been told. Could it be he wasn’t supposed to remember? So why had he been allowed to retain any of it? Maybe it would come back to him as it occurred. But wouldn’t that be too late?
Too late for what?
“Shit!” he exploded, and sweated some more. For there was something desperately wrong here. No, just about everything was desperately wrong here! Somebody—and maybe more than just one somebody—was still fucking with his mind! But how? And why? Or was he simply insane?
Six hundred. He knew about that, definitely … except he still didn’t know what he knew! The mental rambling of a crazy man, or lunatic. “Lunatic”—someone made mad by the moon. And now he really was starting to think like Nostradamus—in riddles and word games.
Six hundred. Six fucking hundred!
A measurement in space or time or both.
Try space. “They are found six hundred miles in space …”It came and went, but the Necroscope clung to it like the proverbial drowning man to his straw. Distance! Six hundred miles from Salon—“south-east of where you sit.”
The World Atlas was still in the kitchen where he’d left it; it seemed to leap from the table into his hands; he scrambled feverishly for the huge double-pages showing Europe. A set of compasses, his kingdom for a set of compasses! Fuck the compasses, he’d make a set of his own!
He took a strip of paper and marked off six hundred miles on the scale of the map, and pinned the strip over France with the pin through Salon. Then he described a circle, and saw that the mark he’d made crossed through Sicily, the mountains of Le Madonie …
“A great mind seethes and shudders,
the father of blood brothers …”
What did it mean? The Francezci brothers, who he’d robbed? But what if it was all only a dream? What if he was making this up himself?
Six hundred. What else about six hundred?
Harry’s lips were dry. He was so tired. Those three days he’d spent in hospital had only seemed to refresh him; but the reason he’d been there had been more mental than physical. And it was the same now: a mental weariness. His eyes and mind were hot, heavy hurting. He remembered some idiot character in Monty Python whose brain had hurt. Harry’s brain hurt, too!
Six hundred. Three times that number had come up. Triple sixes? The Beast in Revelations? No, no, they were distances in space and time. But one thing for sure: all of this was a beast—and a bastard!
“Six hundred north, and west unto the Zero.”
He laughed hysterically and swung his strip of paper into the vertical: north. Then west until the mark hit … zero degrees! At the Greenwich meridian! London!
“The men of magic are his friends, but chained.
They may not help the one who is their hero,
or tell him that which may not be explained.”
Men of magic? In London? E-Branch! Harry’s intuitive maths—and his knowledge of numerology—leaped to the rescue. Darcy Clarke:
D=4, A=1, R=2, C=3, and Y=1. Darcy, an eleven, a magician! Damn right he was! and Clarke:
C=3, L=3, A=1, R=2, K=2, and E=5. A seven: a mystic, occultist, and dedicated delver!
So, E-Branch—or Darcy—knew something but couldn’t tell him. It couldn’t be explained. Or perhaps they daren’t even try to explain it. E-Branch? The dirty tricks brigade?
Harry heard a growl—and it was himself. He was growling deep in his throat! Quit it! He told himself. Quit it now!
And one six hundred to go.
Six hundred … “since the mark of pestilence, entered his soulless soul.”
But whose soulless soul? And six hundred what? Days, weeks or years? Surely not years? Oh, really? A pestilence, six hundred years ago … the Black Death!
And something stirred at the back of Harry’s mind, or in the secret mind he wasn’t given to know. It stirred, and reached to make connections with the rest of him. He felt it like a small flame burning in him, waiting to catch hold and become a roaring fire, a conflagration.
The sweat was dripping from him now, and his mind felt as if it were in a vise, being slowly crushed. And yet he felt he knew.
“I … Christ, I know these fucking things!” Harry cried to no one. “There’s a part of me that knows them!”
“He knows, yet may not know until set free
by the kennel-maid; sees, yet may not understand,
until this Pretty’s eyes search out the treachery
in the dog that bites its keeper’s hand …”
This Pretty? This Bonnie? This Bonnie Jean? Oh, God!
“Stop it now.” A voice warned from deep inside. The Necroscope’s voice, he knew. “Stop it, or you’re going to push yourself right over the edge.” But Harry couldn’t stop. No way. He had to know. Had to know who Bonnie Jean was. Had to know what she was.
“She is her Master’s kennel-maid.
His castle is a hollow place and high …”
Harry? His Ma called out to him from the river, dark now under nonreflective clouds. Harry, come to me now! Come to the riverbank and talk to me this minute! Her voice was filled with a tangible terror, brimming with the need to distract or divert him. But Harry wasn’t about to be diverted. Shielding his mind, specifically against her, he shut her out. Other channels were still open, however, and:
Harry? (It was Sir Keenan Gormley, in no less of a state than the Necroscope’s Ma.) What the hell are you trying to do, son? Destroy yourself?
“No,” he answered, “I’m trying to find myself!” He closed his mind to Sir Keenan.
“Her name is Pretty, but her thoughts are dark.
Hers is to choose where no choice fits her role
in his survival …”
Necroscope, man, you has some bad enemies! (It was R.L. Stevenson Jamieson.) But right now your worst enemy is you! Can’t you see we is only tryin’ to help out here?
“OK,” Harry went for it. “OK, so help me out. Do you know where they are, R.L.? My enemies? Like the Madonie Mountains of Sicily? And what about Tibet? Or how about up there in the Highlands? Am I getting warm, R.L.?”
All those places, Necroscope! And they knows you, man!
“Which means I daren’t stop, because I have to know them. And now, before they’re all over me!”
But there’s bigger dangers in you knowing, Harry! Big dangers, Necroscope! ’Cording to your Ma at least.
“And there’s more in my not knowing. You’re out of here, R.L.” And he shut him out.
“They are of one blood, one and all,
composed of blood, inheritors of life,
which was not theirs to take. Their fall
is possible: the stake, the fire, the knife!”
Wamphyri!
“She is her Master’s kennel-maid.
His castle is a hollow place and high;
his bed is yellow, glowing where he laid
himself to rest who would not die.”
Radu! Radu Lykan! A wolfs head laid back in a protracted howl, against the bloated yellow disc of the full moon …
Harry’s barriers were firmly in pl
ace, his mind closed. He had shut out the frantic voices of his teeming dead friends and was alone with his reasoning, or unreasoning. The two halves of his psyche were merging again. Nostradamus’s quatrains, and some which were the Necroscope’s, swept in disarray across the narrowing screen of his crumbling mind, until—
—where once his formulae held sway,
worlds in weird collision were left.
With his magic numbers blown away,
the Magician was … bereft!
And he knew it, or thought he knew it: that he was mad. He had no reality. What was real was unreal, maybe his whole life! Too many people had fucked with his mind—and together they’d fucked it up completely.
“All done,” said Harry in the voice of a little boy, with an almost glad sigh. Now all he wanted was a safe place that he could go to, where he might do and think … nothing at all.
At Oakdeene Sanatorium, a white-clad orderly with a disbelieving, worried expression rapped urgently on the door of the Director’s office. Then, entering—bursting in before Dr. Quant could so much as look up from the paperwork on his desk—this previously unflappable orderly blurted, “Sir … !” But that was all. He seemed lost for words.
“Willis?” Quant, squat and balding, brushed a few strands of red hair back behind his small ears and stared at the least of his subordinates through thick-lensed spectacles. “I take it there’s a reason for this abrupt intrusion?”
“Intrusion,” the other nodded, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “An inmate … an intruder, anway. And you’re the Duty Officer on call, sir.”
“Well,” Quant sighed and stood up, all five foot three of him. “And aparently a good thing, too! Trouble with an inmate, did you say? Or an intruder? An uninvited guest? Surely not.”
The place was quiet. No alarms going off, no telephones ringing, none of the controlled hustle and bustle of daylight hours. No distance- or insulation-muted cries of rage, frustration, or simple madness; and everything seemed quite literally “sedate.” And most things were.
The Director was here tonight to kill two birds with one stone. It had become neccessary to review some of the asylum’s administrative procedures, its many SOPs and security regulations. Oakdeene housed a good many extremely dangerous men and women; it made sense to check occasionally on their security, and ensure that they really were secure.
So tonight Dr. Quant had put himself on duty to spend the evening with rules and regulations—sufficient to satisfy himself that unless something was radically wrong here, this simian orderly or so-called “male nurse,” Dave Willis, was in fact in error. Oakdeene’s physical barriers were sufficient guarantee in themselves that no unauthorized person could ever gain entry. And yet:
“In D-Ward,” Willis gulped again. At which Quant’s interest picked up apace. D-Ward? (“D” for Dangerous!)
“What about D-Ward?” the director queried, frowning. “Are you supposed to be on D-Ward tonight? And if so why aren’t you down there?”
But Willis wasn’t about to be intimidated. “You’d better see for yourself,” he said. “I couldn’t get you on the phone.”
“I took it off the hook. Busy with the books, Willis. Now what is going on? An intruder? In D-Ward? But how could anyone get past you … if you were there, that is?”
“I was there, all right—and no one got by me.” Was that a sneer on the orderly’s face, in reaction to Quant’s insinuation? “Three security doors between me and the cells, and cameras and alarms on all of them.” He pointed at the book of SOPs on Quant’s desk. “But what am I telling you for?”
“And someone was in there, you say?” The Director shrugged into his jacket.
“Is,” Willis answered. “Still in there. In a locked cell! Of course he is. With all those doors and electronic gear, how would he get out?”
“The question must surely be,” Quant answered, and slammed his office door behind him and the orderly, “how did he get in? And how did you find him? Who is he, anyway?”
They went quickly down the rubber-carpeted corridor, took an elevator down through the three storeys to the ground floor, from where Willis must use a special key to command their descent to D-Ward. And as the cage lowered them silently into the realms of madness, Willis said: “I’ve no idea how anyone could get in. He must have been left in there by the day shift. Someone playing some kind of crazy joke? You tell me—sir. As to how I found him: I was doing the periodic scan of the cells on the monitor. I hit the number of an empty cell by mistake and got a picture. The list said ‘empty’—but the camera doesn’t lie. This man was in there, sitting in a corner. I checked the computer and it said the door was locked. I checked admissions and no one had been booked in. The SOP says …”
“ … Any extraordinary event—or any occurrence that may indicate a breach of security—is to be reported to the Duty Officer immediately. Yes, I know,” Quant nodded. “But a joke? An error? Someone is in trouble for this. Deep trouble!”
They were down into D-Ward; the elevator hissed to a halt and the doors slid silently open. At this end of the corridor, in the security cell, two more orderlies from the less sensitive wards were waiting for them. “I called them down,” Willis explained. “I couldn’t leave the place without they were here. The SOPs, sir.”
All four men looked through an unbreakable window down D-Ward’s corridor to the first security door. None of the fail-safe indicators showed anything wrong. But to one side of the window, from the monitor screen above the security console—and from an allegedly empty cell—the face of a stranger stared back at them. An utterly vacant face, for the moment at least. The face of someone who might well warrant being where he was.
“Cell number?” The Director snapped.
“We’ll have to go all the way to get to him,” Willis answered. “Three doors, three sets of keys. He’s in C-Section, the very last cell.”
“Whoever he is,” one of the other orderlies grinned, then saw the look on Quant’s face and dropped it, “he’s, er, taking no chances. I mean, er, you can’t get any more secure than the very last cell in C-Section. Right … ?”
IV
IN THE MADHOUSE. THE OTHER HARRY.
B.J. HAD GOT HARRY’S MESSAGE. HE HAD SAID HE WOULD KNOW WHEN AND where to find her. Of course he would; as the moon neared its full, he would be obliged to find her and would know where to look. As for the rest of his message: how did he know where their enemies were? Had he interfaced, working it out for himself that things were coming to a head, and where the ultimate venue must be? In which case he was even stronger and stranger than she’d thought. But then, who could know it all about that one? Her mysterious Harry Keogh—or Radu’s. But that remained to be seen …
And meanwhile, she had had to move on. If Harry was wrong and the Drakuls hadn’t gone north, she couldn’t have them knowing her location. And then there were the Watcher and the Ferenczys: she knew for certain that they were in the Highlands, in the Spey Valley, for they had tried to kill Auld John in Inverdruie. So either way Harry was half-right: some of her enemies, at least, were up north, which in turn meant that B.J. couldn’t be—not yet. And trapped between two possible perils, B.J. had moved. But not too far, and not into the Highlands.
If she had—with all three rival vampire factions concentrated in one location, a narrow valley with a handful of towns and villages—sooner or later they must clash. And with Radu’s resurgence so close, B.J. wasn’t about to risk any further confrontations. Anyway, both the Drakuls and the Ferenczys were probably just as leery of her now as she was of them. In three clashes so far, they had come off the worst. As for the fourth: well, poor Zahanine’s death could scarcely be reckoned as part of any legitimate war. No, for that had been sheer murder! And so:
It was a stand-off, and they were biding their time. Having divined Radu’s approximate location—and knowing that B.J. must travel north eventually, to attend him in the hour of his rising—they would lie in wait for her. Then, if they couldn’t take he
r out before she went to Radu, they would simply follow her and catch both of them at their most vulnerable.
Now B.J. and the pack were back in Edinburgh, in a small, backstreet hotel, never leaving the place except for absolute necessities … one of which had caused B.J. her biggest headache to date.
On the off-chance that Harry had tried to contact her at the wine-bar (despite that he’d apparently chosen to stay away from her until the hour as yet to be appointed), B.J. had ventured out one night and followed a circuitous route to the bar. There she had found some unimportant messages on her answering machine, and two that were very important.
Of the latter: one was from a local police station in respect of Inspector George Ianson and requested that she contact the police at her earliest opportunity, and the other was from someone she had never expected to hear from. Or if not “never,” then certainly not as soon as this.
Radu had thralls in the country, moon-children, the sons of the sons of his people from six hundred years ago. Dwellers in lonely places, only two remained, but still they were aware of him. B.J. had visited them on occasion, when it was safe to do so, advising them of their duties at the time of His return. Her instructions between times had been simple to the point of elementary: they were never to contact her until the time appointed, and even then the probability was that she would contact them first. Yet now—
—One of them, Alan Goresci, from his home on the edge of Bodmin Moor, had contacted her and left this message:
“Bonnie Jean. This is Alan-on-the-Moor.” (His accent was pure Cornish.) “I’ve spoken with young Garth, who is close by as you know. Both of us, we’ve heard the call. And we’re restless. It’s the high ground we’re heading for. We’ll be on the way by the time you hear this. I wouldn’t have contacted you, but if you were to do it, you’ve left it a bit late. So maybe there’s a problem? And Auld John’s no to house that I can see. We’ll look him up; doubtless through him we’ll find you. Till then, we’re hoping that all is well under the moon …” End of message.