Necroscope: Defilers

  “No,” Jake answered, “so we’ll do it by trial and error. It was dumb of me, really. I should have taken them from Natasha’s mind. But my own mind … was elsewhere at the time.”

  So where do we start?

  “San Remo, because I’ve been there,” said Jake. And so they went to San Remo …

  San Remo, gateway to the Riviera di Ponente.

  Jake knew the bars, the city, and the lifestyle. That of the rich, anyway. But right now he was slumming. He went to a small bar he knew—a dingy little place that served great pizza and toasted sandwiches, and his favourite beer, imported Dortmunder Actien on tap—had brunch and a beer at the bar, and while he ate talked to the bartender.

  The bartender spoke good English, and Jake spoke some Italian; they got on well enough. The bartender remembered him from previous visits; he kept his voice low as he asked: “Where have you been hiding, Jake? Your face was in the papers awhile, but not recently. They let you off the hook or something?”

  The place was almost empty, only two other people seated by the door and locked in conversation, so Jake considered it safe to talk. “Or something,” he grinned humourlessly, then got down to business. “I’m looking for … for an old friend of mine. A bit of a dark horse called Castellano. A Sicilian, I think. But he owns property close to San Remo, and I wondered if you—”

  “—If I might know of him?” The barman, small and balding, wiped his hands on his apron, then cocked his head on one side enquiringly. “Do you have a problem with this person, Jake? If so, you should know he is a bad one. I don’t know him, I never saw him, but some of his people—or the people he deals with—come in here from time to time. These are not nice people.”

  Jake nodded. “I know. But you don’t need to worry. I don’t know your name, and I’ve never been in your bar in my life.”

  “But if they hurt you enough, you’d tell them otherwise.”

  “They’re not looking to hurt me,” Jake answered. “They’re looking to kill me. That’s why I want to get there first.”

  “Ah!” said the other, blinking rapidly.

  “So you needn’t worry,” said Jake. “If I’m alive when this is over, they won’t be. And if I’m dead, I won’t be doing much talking, right?”

  Except perhaps to me! said Korath.

  Jake told him, Be quiet, then glanced around the room. The place was still empty, so he took the opportunity to pass a wad of francs over the bar. A bank teller’s paper wrapper was still intact, with a stark black legend 1000 FR. standing out as if illuminated. And: “Can you do me an exchange?” said Jake.

  “For lire?” The bartender raised an eyebrow, began to shake his head.

  “No, for another beer,” said Jake. “Pull yourself one, too—and keep the change.”

  Then, without pause: “Two kilometres east of San Remo,” the bartender muttered, as he snatched up the money and put it away under the bar, “where the mountains come down to the sea on the coastal road to Imperia. We call it Millionaire’s Row, and this Castellano has a place there. I gather he’s not often home, but there are usually one or two of his drug-dealing friends there, local hoods who look after the place when he’s away. And like I said, sometimes they come in here. Which is why it would please me if you were to leave now.”

  “I’m on my way,” said Jake, getting off his bar stool. “And thanks. But just one more thing. Does the place have a name?”

  “Castellano’s place? Er, yeah, I think so,” said the other, his brow wrinkling in concentration. “It’s called, er, Le Manse—let me think—Le Manse …”

  “Madonie?” The word sprang into Jake’s mind out of nowhere.

  “Right,” the bartender nodded. “Le Manse Madonie.”

  As Jake left the bar, Korath said, I don’t recall that Natasha named the place?

  “Neither do I,” said Jake. “But I suppose she must have.”

  Jake found a cambista and changed francs to lire, then hired a cab to take him to Imperia some twenty-five kilometres east of San Remo. Barely out of the city, he asked the driver: “Do you know the names of these places?” He meant the fabulously rich dwellings built into the mountainside at the left-hand side of the road. On the other side, the cliffs fell sheer to the sea.

  As good as gold the driver reeled the names off, and waved out of his widow at the houses as he sped past. Driving as only an Italian would on a road such as this, he seemed oblivious of the danger immediately to his right.

  And shortly: “Le Manse Madonie!” he cried, and Jake told him to pull off the road for a moment while he “got his bearings”; true enough, though “coordinates” might have been a better term for it.

  It was as Jake had feared. The house, a flat-roofed, chalet-style building, whose broad front was propped on stanchions and projected from the cliff overhead, could only be accessed via a steep private road. And there was no obvious vantage point from which he might view the property through his binoculars. As for the actual location of the place: that had already fixed itself firmly in his mind, which would have to suffice for now.

  And so on to Imperia, where Jake found a cafe with panoramic sea views, drank several cappuccinos, but mainly sat lost in his own thoughts. It wasn’t yet noon, but already he could feel the pressure building to go places and get things done. He knew what he wanted to do, but wasn’t too sure about the places. Not sure at all about one of them.

  What’s on your mind? Korath felt obliged to ask him after a while, because Jake was keeping it to himself.

  “Le Manse Madonie,” said Jake, opening up a little.

  We’ve just been there, said Korath.

  “But not the one I know,” Jake answered. “Not the Le Manse Madonie.”

  There’s more than one?

  “Unless I’m going mad, yes. Because I know the coordinates of another Le Manse Madonie—I think.”

  You think? said Korath. So maybe you got something from Natasha after all. Where do you think this place is?

  “That’s just the problem,” said Jake, as he sat gazing into the southeast, frowning five hundred miles out across the Ligurian Sea. “I can’t say where it is for sure—but I think it’s somewhere out there. And I know we do have to go there.”

  By all means, said Korath, conjuring the Möbius equations.

  As Jake had remarked to his incorporeal “friend,” he wasn’t too sure where he was going—but he did know that he had to go there, if only to find out. And perhaps to find himself, too …

  He was getting used to the Möbius Continuum now.

  At first he had had to keep his eyes closed. It wasn’t that Jake was afraid of the dark, but there’s dark and there’s dark. This was the primal darkness before there was light, and before there was matter, and weight, and time. A place “between” space and time, yet parallel to both of them. A universe between universes. And an absence of “everything”—which must include even the vacuums that Nature so abhors—is darker far than simply an absence of light.

  After he had got over the eyes-closed stage, then he’d kept them shuttered, which somehow served to make the blackness grey and was more acceptable. But now he accepted the blackness, the utter emptiness, itself. And despite that the Möbius Continuum was nothing, he could feel it all around him. And through Jake, Korath could feel it, too.

  It’s like death, the vampire said, and yet it’s alive. Not warm like you, but not cold either. You can feel it—

  “—And therefore, according to the laws of physics, it must be feeling me,” said Jake, his voice the merest whisper. For in the Möbius Continuum even thoughts have weight, and a normally spoken word can be like a thunderclap.

  I know nothing of physics, said Korath.

  “That’s what worries me,” Jake told him. “Neither do I. Or I didn’t use to. So I’m not sure whose physics these are … or even if they’re physics. Metaphysics, maybe. Möbius physics.”

  I only know what your mind shows me. And you’re not showing me everything.

/>   “But there’s something I would certainly like to show you,” said Jake. “If only because I want to see it myself—again.”

  Er, shouldn’t we be there by now? said Korath uneasily.

  “Where?” Jake whispered.

  Where we’re going.

  “But aren’t you interested? There’s something I want you to see en route.”

  But in a place such as this, what’s to see? More darkness?

  Jake shook his head and said, “Light! The birthlight of the human race.” And there was that in his voice—an unaccustomed humility—that made Korath want to see it, too. And:

  By all means, said the vampire. Show me this light.

  “Harry Keogh showed me this in a dream,” said Jake, “which was of course more than a mere dream. It must have been, for I remember the coordinates. And they’re here!”

  The past-time door opened, and Jake stood at the threshold. Korath looked out through his eyes, seeming to hear with Jake’s ears, the incredible one-note Ahhhhhhhh! sound of myriad angelic voices, like a vast unearthly choir in the sounding chambers of some cosmic cathedral. But in fact there was no sound; time and the Möbius Continuum have no sound, else it would be the unbearable cacophony of everything that has ever been and is still to be. It was all in the mind—in Jake’s mind—as it had been in only a small handful of other minds before his. A phantom sound that should have been there, as the only possible accompaniment to the awesome scene beyond the door.

  It was like looking into three-dimensional space, the heart of some incredible blue nebula. For at its source, indeed there was a hazy nebulosity.

  The beginning, Jake said, reverting to pure thought now, as if in a place like this, speech were more than unnecessary, even irreverent. The source of all human life.

  And out of the nebulosity, uncountable blue threads—tike living neon filaments—seemed to thicken as they came speeding away from the clustered centre towards the observers. The life-threads of humanity, said Jake, knowing it for a fact, without remembering if he had been told it or if this were his natural instinct speaking. Every single one of those threads is or was the life of a man, a woman, a child. In the heart of the cloud there, that was the time of the emergence—but how many millions of years ago?

  Korath found his “voice” at last and said, Some of them … they don’t reach the door but falter and blink out. And some of them snap out of existence, while others gradually fade.

  The difference between a sudden termination, said Jake, and a gentler, more gradual death. The difference between an accident or fatal disease, and the creep into old age. But just look at them. When you look into deep space you’re looking back into time, Korath. And the same here, except here we’re looking back into Man.

  All of those twisting, twining, outwards-rushing blue life-threads, all sentient, thrusting, seeking. Moving from the past to the present. This is Mankind, said Jake simply. Everyone who ever was, and those who still are.

  That one there, said Korath, that blue thread, is you! Your past. Just see how it crosses the threshold—into you! But as for me—I don’t have one.

  That’s because you’re dead, Jake told him. And when you did have one it was red, not blue, the scarlet thread of a vampire. Back there along my life-thread, there are more red threads. Do you see them?

  Yes, Korath answered, but they’re far away and falling farther behind with each passing moment. And most of them … have stopped. Snapped out of existence. Permanently.

  Terminated, said Jake. Malinari’s people, who Ben Trask and E-Branch and I stopped out in Australia. Because we daren’t let the red contaminate the blue.

  And Korath’s deadspeak voice was very small now as he said, We seem to be moving. This past-time door, and you and I, we’re being pushed away.

  But: No, Jake answered, not pushed away. We’re being pushed forward. By time itself. Pushed into the now.

  Don’t you mean into the future?

  Into the now, said Jake again. The future is another place, and maybe I’ll show you it another time. It seemed a contradiction in terms, but it would have to suffice.

  They moved away from the past-time door, and a moment later Jake said, “We’re here.” Wherever here would turn out to be …

  It turned out to be the surface of a road up the steep contours of a mountainside, with the rim of a high plateau up front, and the broad expanse of the sea below and behind.

  “The Madonie,” said Jake, knowing it for a certainty, without knowing how. “A mountain range in northern Sicily. And down there, Luigi Castellano’s quarry—the quarry in the gorge that Natasha told me about—where ostensibly he mines stone for his ‘building projects,’ while in fact he’s mining buried treasures that were stolen by the Nazis in World War Two. Natasha told me about it, yes—and it was one of the places I had scheduled to visit—but I know I didn’t get these coordinates from her.”

  From where then? said Korath.

  Jake shook his head. “I just knew them. It seems that I … that I remembered them?”

  From the original Necroscope? Harry Keogh?

  “It’s not the first time,” said Jake. “There are times when I speak—or when I’ve spoken—to Lardis Lidesci, when I got the same feeling. He evokes a weird sort of pseudomemory in me, when I seem to remember the places he talks about, places where I can’t possibly have been, because they’re in another world.”

  Jake’s binoculars hung from his shoulder on a strap. Now he opened the case, took them out, and looked through them into the quarry under frowning cliffs.

  “I feel that I’ve stood here before,” he said. “But I don’t remember that quarry … where those men and machines aren’t so much quarrying as turning over rubble fallen from … huh?”

  He paused abruptly, and swung the binoculars up, up, up the face of the sheer gorge to the rim of the plateau—craning his neck to focus on that which he knew should be there but wasn’t—only a rim that was fresh and deeply scarred, as from a fall of thousands of tons of rock. He saw the great scar in the face of the high plateau—

  —and in the next moment watched it blur out of existence, until it became what he had expected to see in the first place: Le Manse Madonie, as it once was!

  A squat, white-walled castle, mansion, or château, perched on the edge of oblivion, where a moment ago there had been only a mighty bight in the raw cliff face! An unassailable fortress, standing at the rim of a precipice that towered at least twelve hundred metres over the gorge and the sloping scree wall of the rubble-strewn quarry.

  The place was there in the eye of Jake’s mind—real, if only for a moment—and then was gone!

  What is it? said Korath, alarmed as Jake staggered and very nearly fell. What’s wrong?

  “You didn’t see it?”

  What, in your inner mind? Your secret mind? You know better than that!

  “It was Le Manse Madonie,” said Jake. “It was Le Manse Madonie—but now it’s only that heap of rubble there, which Luigi Castellano excavates for the treasures it once contained.”

  But how do you know these things?

  “Partly from what Natasha told me—that Castellano wasn’t mining rocks here—and partly from memory.”

  But not your memory.

  “No,” Jake shook his head. “Not mine …”

  Harry? Another deadspeak voice in Jake’s mind. But definitely not Korath’s, for this one was entirely human. The voice of someone who had died here, who had mistaken Jake for the Necroscope, Harry Keogh!

  Jake had given a small start; now he got his wits together, and said, “I’m not Harry. I’m just a friend of his. At least, I hope so.”

  Not Harry? said that new voice in his head. Well, you could have fooled me! I felt your warmth—exactly the same as his—and I just knew it was him! But what the hell … any friend of Harry’s is a friend of mine. Especially around these parts.

  “These parts?” said Jake.

  Sicily, said the other, with a deadspeak no
d. And more especially this part of Sicily. It’s been quiet as the tomb around here! And Jake “heard” a slightly hysterical deadspeak chuckle. I mean, man, I was beginning to think I’d never get to speak to anyone again! It’s these Sicilians, you know? Like never a peep out of any of ’em. See, they had their own code in life, and—

  “—And what they did in life they continue to do in death,” Jake finished it for him. “A code of silence.”

  That’s right. But listen, if you’re not Harry, then you can only be this other fellow, this, er—?

  “Jake,” said Jake. “Jake Cutter.”

  Yeah, right, said the other, far less excited now. And the Great Majority haven’t made up their minds about you yet. See, even out here in the deadspeak wilderness, still I get to hear the occasional whisper.

  “The teeming dead do seem to have some kind of problem with me,” Jake answered. “While I don’t quite understand it, I can’t deny it. But either way, I wouldn’t want to get you in any kind of trouble. It seems to me you’ve enough of that already.”

  Absolutely, said the other. You can’t be in any deeper shit than being dead, man. But on the other hand, I really can’t get in any deeper shit! So what’s the difference? Anyway, it’s like I said: any friend of Harry’s is a friend of mine.

  “You’re an American, right?” said Jake. “So who are you?”

  Who was I, do you mean? said the other. Hey, you know, you’re a lot more like Harry than you know? I remember he asked me that selfsame question, and I answered it the same way, too. But damn it, it looks like I’m a lot rustier than I thought, my manners are all shot to hell! Excuse me, will you? I used to be J. Humphrey Jackson Jr.—and I used to build safes. I built a safe in the cellars of Le Manse Madonie, which used to stand up there on the rim of the gorge. The brothers who owned the place must have thought I’d seen too much, so they fixed it for me to have a little “accident.” End of story … until the Necroscope came by and squared things for me.

  “He squared things for you?” Jake sensed the importance of all this. “How did he manage that?”