The Last Aerie Read online

  As for Ben Trask, he reckoned they all owed Harry Keogh something, the whole world. It would have been so easy for the Necroscope to release the plague of vampirism which he carried within himself upon all humanity and be emperor here, with an entire planet for his empire. But instead he’d let them hound him into exile in an alien world of vampires, where he would be just one more monster. Harry had let it happen, yes, before the Thing inside him could take full control.

  But whenever Trask thought back on that, on the alien passions which had governed Harry—how he’d looked the last time Trask saw him, in the garden of his burning house not far from Edinburgh—then his own mixed emotions would sort themselves out in short order, and he would know it was for the best:

  The lower half of Harry’s figure had been mist-shrouded, visible only as a vague outline in the opaque, milky swirl of his vampire mist … but the rest of him had been all too visible. He’d worn an entirely ordinary suit of dark, ill-fitting clothes which seemed two sizes too small for him, so that his upper torso sprouted from the trousers to form a blunt wedge. Framed by a jacket held together by one straining button, the bulk of Harry’s rib cage had been massively muscular.

  His white, open-necked shirt had burst open down the front, revealing the ripple of his muscle-sheathed ribs and the deep, powerful throb of his chest; the shirt’s collar had looked like a crumpled frill, insubstantial around the corded bulk of his leaden neck. His flesh was a sullen grey, dappled lurid orange and sick yellow by leaping fire and gleaming moonlight. And he towered all of a foot taller than Trask, quite literally dwarfing him. But his face—

  —That had been the absolute embodiment of a waking nightmare! His halogen Halloween eyes which had seemed to drip sulphur. And his … grin? A grin, was that what it had been? Maybe, in an alien vampire world called Starside on the other side of the Möbius Continuum. But here on Earth it had been the rabid slavering grimace of a great wolf; here it was teeth visibly elongating, curving up and out of gleaming gristle jaw-ridges to shear through gums which spurted splashes of hot ruby blood; here it was a writhing of scarlet lips, a flattening of convoluted snout, a yawning of man-trap jaws.

  That face … that mouth … that crimson cavern of stalactite, stalagmite teeth, as jagged as shards of white, broken glass. What? Like the gates of hell? That and worse, for Harry had been Wamphyri!

  Trask started massively as Anna Marie English, standing on his right, grasped his elbow and needlessly, breathlessly stated, “Sir, he’s moving away from us.”

  She was right, as everyone there could see. The hologram of the corpse was getting smaller, falling or receding faster and faster towards a multihued, nebulous origin or destiny out of which the blue, green, and red ribbons of neon light reached like writhing tentacle arms to welcome it. The smoking, rotating figure dwindled; it became a mote, a speck; it disappeared!

  And where it had been—

  An explosion! A sunburst of golden light, expanding silently, hugely, awesomely! So that the thirteen observers gasped and ducked down; and despite that it was in their group mind, they turned away from the blinding intensity of the glare and what flew out of it. All except Ben Trask, who shielded his eyes and shrank down a little but continued to watch—because he must know the truth. Trask, and also David Chung, who cried his astonishment, staggered, and almost fell. But they had seen, both of them:

  Those myriad golden splinters speeding outwards from the sunburst, angling this way and that, sentient, seeking, disappearing into as many unknown places. Those—pieces—of the Necroscope, Harry Keogh? All that remained of him? And as the last of them had zipped by Trask and vanished silently out of view—out into the corridor, apparently—so the streamers of blue, green, and red metaphysical light had blinked out of being, returning the briefing room’s illumination to normal.

  Except … that last golden dart had seemed so real. Why, Trask could have sworn that it had actually materialized right here in the ops room, sentient and solid, before speeding out into the corridor and disappearing from view!

  And now, within the room, thirteen startled, gaping, extraordinary human beings. But perfectly ordinary in comparison to what they had witnessed …

  Trask forced himself into action, stepped across the room to where David Chung was still mazed, staggering. He took hold of him, steadied him, snapped, “David, are you all right?”

  “No—yes,” the other answered. “But he isn’t.” He licked dry lips and closed his slack mouth, half pointed and flapped a hand towards the center of the room where the espers were moving about in it once more.

  “Was it Harry?” Trask breathed.

  Chung sighed heavily and collapsed a little into himself. “Oh, yes. It was Harry, Ben. It was him.”

  “The end of him?”

  Chung nodded, opened his trembling hand and showed the other what he was holding: a pig-bristle hairbrush whose oval wooden plaque fitted snug in his palm. For a moment Trask was mystified … then he understood. It was Chung’s talent: he was a sympathetic tracker, a locator. Following the Bodescu affair Harry Keogh had stayed here at E-Branch HQ for a month, filling in the blank spaces. For a time he’d even considered taking on the position of head of Branch. But with the loss of his wife and son, the Necroscope’s world had collapsed and he’d moved on, become a recluse up in Scotland. The hairbrush had been his, one of several items he’d left behind.

  “I’ve kept it all this time, since I was first recruited into the Branch,” Chung now explained to the other espers as they gathered round. “This and one or two other pieces which were his. Six months ago, when the Russians reported Harry’s escape through the Perchorsk Gate, I took out his things and tried to locate him. I mean, I obviously couldn’t locate him, but it was just the same as when Jazz Simmons went through: I knew that Harry wasn’t here, not in this world, but he wasn’t dead either. He was in Starside.”

  “And now?” It was Anna Marie English, worrying for her world, for herself.

  Chung shook his head. “Now he isn’t.”

  “Not in Starside?” one of the younger espers gasped. “You mean he’s come back? He’s here?”

  Again Chung shook his head, showed them the brush in his hand. “This piece of wood, these few bristles, meant something, told me something. They told me that the Necroscope was alive; if not here, alive somewhere. Only let me pick up this brush or Harry’s other things, and I knew it. Now … it’s just a hairbrush, no longer alive. And neither is Harry Keogh. He died a few moments ago, somewhere. And we all saw it.”

  “Harry’s dead.” Ben Trask made no bones of it. “What we’ve just witnessed was him. Somehow, he found a way to let us know, give us peace of mind. That’s how I see it, anyway.”

  Ian Goodly came in with a pair of late arrivals: another esper and the Branch’s Minister Responsible. The minister was in his midforties, young for his job, but had a mind sharp as a knife. Small and dapper, with keen blue eyes and dark hair brushed back and plastered down, his blue suit was fashionable in the Corridors of Power; somehow his dress as a whole marked him as a person of class. In no way psychically talented, still the minister was Branch; he too had felt the call—something had lured him here—until a moment ago, when it had stopped.

  While Trask told the minister what had happened, Goodly fetched coffee. Then for an hour, two, the entire group sat around and remembered Harry. They said very little but were satisfied just to be there. And despite that they should have been jubilant, they weren’t. And for all that a great plague had passed them by, most of them felt they’d lost a friend.

  David Chung had put Harry’s brush in his pocket; every now and then he would reach in and touch it with his fingertips. But it was just a brush now, wood and glue and bristle, inanimate, without being.

  And that’s how it would stay for sixteen long years …

  A fortnight later Zek Föener called from her Greek island home in Zante. She’d put it off until it was unbearable, but in the end had to speak to Trask.
“Are we friends again, Ben?”

  For all that she couldn’t see him, he nodded and smiled. He knew that Zek would sense it, for she was a powerful telepath. “After that job we did on Janos Ferenczy’s creatures in the Med? We’ll always be friends, Zek.”

  “Despite that I helped him in the end?” Her voice was a little distorted by the line but her anxiety was real enough. Trask’s talent was working for him, so that her sincerity was as tangible as the steady beat of his own heart.

  He shrugged, which she would also sense, and said, “You’re not the only one who helped Harry, Zek.”

  “You, too? I somehow thought you would.”

  “I took a chance,” he told her. “If it had gone the other way … I could have ended up the biggest traitor mankind has ever known! By now there might have been a new world order.”

  “I know. I thought much the same thing. But it was Harry, after all.”

  “Half of it was, anyway,” Trask answered.

  “Actually, he died six, seven months ago,” she said.

  “What?” She’d taken Trask by surprise.

  “He was dead to us the moment he went through the Perchorsk Gate,” she explained. “Or as good as. There was no way we were ever going to see him again. He’d used both of the Gates, the one in the Urals and the one in Romania. He couldn’t come back; the grey holes would reject him.”

  Trask had been happy to hear her voice, talk to Zek, but suddenly his mood was grim. She’d brought something up that he didn’t like to think about. “That’s true as far as it goes,” he said, “but his son used a different route. Harry had considered himself the master of the Möbius Continuum, but in fact he was a novice. Those are his words, not mine. Harry Junior was the real master. But if anyone knows that, you do: it’s how he brought you and Jazz out of that place back here.”

  There was a pause before she answered. “The Dweller still worries you, right?”

  “The Dweller?” Trask frowned. But in the next moment: “Oh, yes: you mean Harry Junior. He worries me, right enough. The Perchorsk Gate worries me, and the resurgence of one of the Danube’s tributaries near Radujevac in Romania. They all worry me, for they’re all routes into this world from the world of the vampires.”

  “But they’re covered now, surely?”

  “Harry Junior isn’t.”

  And now it was Trask’s turn to sense the shake of a head. “He won’t be coming back,” Zek told him. “He was Wamphyri, yes, but he was different. As different as the Lady Karen. As different as his father. He fought for his territory on Starside, and he’ll stay there and keep it. He battled with the vampires, Ben, destroyed them, and to my knowledge he didn’t create a one out of himself. He kept no thralls, no lieutenants, no vampire lovers. Just friends. But they did love him, even as much as the Great Majority loved his father.”

  She had reassured him. “Zek, I know you’ve turned me down before,” he said, “but I really think you and Jazz should come over here sometime. Be our guests and stay in London a while at our expense, and tell us your story in full. No, you don’t owe us anything, neither one of you. But you said it yourself: we’re friends. And the pair of you have such a lot of information locked in your heads: about Starside, the Wamphyri, even things about Harry Keogh and his son, that only you know. The world’s improving, Zek—not by leaps and bounds, not yet—but who knows … Maybe you can help it along the way? Or if not help it, protect it at least.”

  And before she could answer him: “I mean, it’s not like it used to be, Zek, not anymore. You were used, you and Jazz both—oh, and too many others—by Russia’s E-Branch, and by ours, too. But lessons were learned and it isn’t like that anymore. We’re all of us learning all the time. I’ve thought about it a lot, and it’s as if everything the Necroscope touched upon has been improved and changed forever. Before he’d even discovered the Möbius Continuum, he had to use Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin to get into East Germany and talk to Möbius in his Leipzig grave. And where’s the checkpoint now, eh? As for Romania

  … Do you see what I mean, Zek? It’s as if mankind has turned a new leaf, and all since Harry came along, or since he left us. But should we be surprised, really? I remember Harry once said, ‘There are a great many talents among the dead, and they have their ways of using them.’ But it was him who showed them how to talk to each other, connecting them up in their graves. Since when—just look around the world.

  “Are they responsible, the teeming dead? Who knows what they’ve achieved, or how they did it? Communism is on its last legs, a dismal failure, and the world’s a safer place. After we send the rest of our false ideological gods packing, then maybe we can start over: a grand restructuring, the ecology of Mother Earth herself. Right now the world is safer, but it’s still not safe enough. Could you and Jazz help make it just a little bit safer, Zek? That’s what I want you to think about. If not for me, for Harry. I mean, don’t you reckon it’s worth finishing the job that he started?”

  “That’s cheating, Ben,” she told him.

  “Well, think about it anyway.”

  Later, she did think about it. Zek and Jazz both. But they didn’t go to London. It would take a long time for their wounds to heal, a long time before they would forgive the world’s ESP-Branches …

  While sixteen years isn’t a long time in the Great Scheme of things, still, changes do occur. People, faces, places change; governments and organizations come and go; causes and ideologies collapse and others spring into being. But establishments are wont to continue, if only because they are established.

  Cold wars had come and gone; hot ones, too, however brief, localized; the world’s Secret Services were always in demand. Even during periods of intense perestroika and glasnost (perhaps especially through such periods), that most esoteric of all services, E-Branch, had gone on, with Ben Trask continuing as head of Branch. While some of his agents were no more and others had been recruited to take their places, the organization itself was an extremely successful establishment. There would always be work for the Branch, and if ever that should change … the truth of it was that the government of the day probably wouldn’t know what to do with the Branch’s esoteric talents if they were disbanded. At least this way the espers could be seen to be working for the common good.

  As for the current state of the world:

  Communist China was slipping fast on the worn-down heels of Russia into a bog of stagnation and economic decay, and the USSR itself was much less unified. Internally, Russia was still recovering from seventy years of self-inflicted wounds, but its occasional hemorrhages were all on the inside now, and issued from vastly reduced lesions. There was no longer even a remote threat of global conflict; the last remaining superpower, the USA, was ultimately potent and alert, as were her allies. But more importantly, theirs was a generally benign alliance. And just as Ben Trask had once forecast, the world was a much safer place now; so much so that it had become a fad among political and historical commentators to attempt to identify the turning point and name the prime factors and movers:

  The microchip; Lech Walesa; giant technological spin-offs from the space race and the Star Wars program; spies in the sky; Chernobyl; the total collapse of European Communism; President Reagan, Prime Minister Thatcher, and to some extent Premier Gorbachev; the war in the Gulf, where the entire world had watched with fascination, astonishment, and more than a little horror as uninspired warriors with outmoded, outgunned weapons were mown down under the previously unimaginable onslaught of outraged passions and superior technology.

  And through all of this, no one except perhaps a handful of E-Branch members remembered Harry Keogh, Necroscope, or attributed anything of the current world order to his works. And other than that same small handful, no one credited the Great Majority, the teeming dead, with even the smallest part in it.

  Which was the way things stood on that Monday morning in January 2006 when Trask arrived at E-Branch HQ in the heart of London, and found David Chung prowling to
and fro in the foyer with a cellphone, waiting for him. Except it wasn’t the cellphone which brought Trask up short as he entered the building but the look on Chung’s face, and what he was holding in his other hand: an old hairbrush.

  Harry Keogh’s old hairbrush …

  Before Trask saw that, however, he recognized Chung’s urgency and commenced to say, “Sorry, David, my carphone is on the blink. And anyway there’s so much interference these days a man can’t even think, let alone speak! Is there a problem? Were you trying to … contact … me?”

  By then he’d seen the hairbrush and jerked to a halt. The occurrences of that night sixteen years ago had all come rushing back in a flood of vivid memories, and the beat of Trask’s heart had picked up speed to match the sudden flow of adrenaline. “David?” he said, making it a question.

  Chung answered with a grim nod, simply that, and whisked him into the elevator. But as the doors slid shut on them and they were alone, he uttered those words which Trask had most dreaded to hear: “He’s back.”

  Trask didn’t want to believe it. “He?” he husked, knowing full well who he must be, the only one he could be. “Harry?”

  Chung nodded, shrugged helplessly, seemed lost for words. But: “Something of him,” he answered at last, “who or whatever he is now. But yes, Ben, I’m talking about Harry. Something of Harry Keogh has come back to us …”

  2

  Harry’s Room

  From the hotel manager’s point of view, E-Branch didn’t even exist. He occasionally forgot that the hotel had a top storey, which wasn’t strange, for he’d never seen it. The occupants of that unknown uppermost level had their own elevator situated at the rear of the building, private stairs also at the rear, even their own fire escape. Indeed, “they” owned the top floor, and so fell entirely outside the hotel’s sphere of management and operation.