Necroscope 4: Deadspeak Read Free

Keogh: that should be the very simplest thing. Harry Keogh is incorporeal, a bodiless id, his own infant son’s sixth sense. Only remove the child, and the father goes with him.
    Meanwhile Harry has learned all he can of vampire history, of means to destroy them, of ancient ground which may still require cleansing of their evil. He initiates E-Branch’s attack on Harkley House.
    In the USSR, however, Felix Krakovitch has been killed and Alec Kyle, head of E-Branch, is falsely accused of his murder. Russian espers have taken Kyle to the Chateau Bronnitsy where they are using a combination of high technology and ESP to drain him of all knowledge. That is: all knowledge! The most severe form of brainwashing and intelligence-gathering, the treatment will leave him literally brain-dead, a husk, a body robbed of its governing mind. And when the body dies Kyle will be dumped in West Berlin with never a mark on him. That, at least, is the plan.
    In the interim Yulian Bodescu has not been idle. For a long time he has been breeding something in Harkley’s cellars; his Alsatian dog is more than a dog; he has raped and vampirized a visiting aunt and cousin, and even infected his own mother. The house, when E-Branch’s men attack, is discovered to be a place of total lunacy, mayhem and nightmare!
    Bodescu escapes, the only survivor as Harkley House goes up in cleansing fire. Intent on destroying the Keogh child, he heads north for Hartlepool. His trail is bloody and littered with E-Branch agents when finally he enters the house and climbs to Brenda Keogh’s top-floor flat. The mother tries to protect her child and is hurled aside. Harry Jr. is awake; his mind contains Harry Keogh; the monster is upon them, powerful hands reaching …
    Harry can do nothing. Trapped in the infant’s whirlpool id, he knows that they are both about to die. But then:
    Go, little Harry tells him. Through you I’ve learned what I had to learn. I don’t need you that way any longer. But I do need you as a father. So go on, get out, save yourself. The mental attraction which binds Harry to his son’s mind has been relaxed; he can now flee into the Möbius Continuum; but … he can’t!
    “You’re my son. How can I go, and leave you here with … with this?”
    But Harry Jr. has no intention of being left behind. He has his father’s knowledge; he is a mature mind in the body of an infant, lacking only experience; they both flee to the Möbius Continuum!
    The child has inherited much more than this, however. What the father could do, the infant son can do in spades. Harry Jr. is a Necroscope of enormous power. In the ancient cemetery just across the road, the dead answer his call. They come out of their graves, shuffle, flop, crawl from the graveyard and into the house, and up the stairs. Bodescu flees but they trap him and employ the old time-tested methods of eradication: the stake, decapitation, cleansing fire …
    Harry Keogh is free, but free to do what? Incorporeal, the Möbius Continuum must eventually absorb him … or perhaps expel him elsewhere, elsewhere. However bodiless, he is still a “foreign body” in Möbius’s enigmatic emptiness of mathematical conjecture.
    Except … there is a force—an attraction other than Harry Jr.’s infant id—a vacuum to be filled. It is the vacuum of Alec Kyle’s drained mind, and when Harry explores he is sucked in irresistibly to reanimate the brain-dead esper.
    It is late September 1977, and Harry Keogh, Necroscope and explorer of the metaphysical Möbius Continuum, has taken up permanent residence in another man’s body; indeed to all intents and purposes, and to anyone who doesn’t know better, he is that other man. But Harry is also the natural father of a most unnatural child, a child with awesome supernatural powers.
    Harry employs ultra-high explosives to blow the Chateau Bronnitsy to hell, then rides the Möbius Strip home to seek out his wife and child … only to discover that they have