Necroscope 4: Deadspeak Read Free Page B

exhausted every bolthole, searched everywhere.
    Darcy Clarke, head of INTESP, goes to see Harry at his Edinburgh home. He starts to tell him about Perchorsk but Harry isn’t interested. As Clarke fills in the details, however, Harry’s interest picks up. His old enemies the Soviet mindspies have established a cell at Perchorsk to block metaphysical prying. They’re obviously hiding something big, something very unpleasant. They have a regiment of troops up there in the mountains, equipped with real firepower—for what? Who is likely to attack the Urals? Who do the Russians think they’re keeping out? … What are they keeping in?
    “We think they’re doing something with genetics,” Clarke tells Harry. “We think they’re breeding warrior vampires!”
    Even now Harry is only half-swayed; but at last Clarke plays his trump:
    The British spy in Perchorsk, Michael J. Simmons, has vanished; the very best of E-Branch’s espers can’t find him; they believe he’s alive (he hasn’t been “cancelled”, or their telepaths would know) but they don’t know where he’s alive. Which precisely parallels Harry’s own problem. Perhaps, by some weird freak of coincidence, Harry Jr., Brenda Keogh and the Perchorsk spy are all in the same place. To be doubly sure that E-Branch aren’t just using him to their own ends, Harry asks his myriad dead friends to look into it. Is there a recent arrival in their teeming ranks by the name of Michael J. Simmons? But:
    There is not. Simmons isn’t dead, he’s simply not here …
    Harry investigates and discovers that the accident at the Perchorsk Projekt has blown a hole in space-time, a “grey hole” leading to a world “parallel” with our own; also that the world on the other side is the spawning ground of vampires, indeed The Source of all vampire myth and legend.
    He talks again to the long-dead August Ferdinand Möbius, to the devious mind of the extinct Faethor Ferenczy, and to more recent friends among the legions of the dead; until finally he discovers an alternate route into the vampire world. And what a monstrous world that is!
    Sunside is hot, a blazing desert; Starside is the realm of the Wamphyri, where their aeries stand kilometre-high close to the mountain pinnacles which divide the planet. On Sunside the Travellers, the original Gypsies, wander in bands and tribes through the verdant foothills of the central range; active during the long days, they burrow in dark holes and caves through the short, fear-filled nights. For when the sun sets on Sunside—that’s when the Wamphyri come a-hunting.
    Travellers and Trogs (a primitive aboriginal race) are to the Wamphyri what the coconut is to Earth’s tropical islanders. They form a large part of their diet, provide slaves, workers, women; even when they die or are disposed of there is rarely any waste. Their remains go to feed Wamphyri “gas-beasts”, “siphoneers” and “warriors”, which are themselves fashioned of transmuted Trogs and Travellers. Their grotesquely altered, fossilized bodies decorate the vertiginous, glooming castles of the Wamphyri, are even formed into furniture or hardened into exterior sheaths, so protecting the aerie properties of their vampire masters against the elements.
    As for the Lords of these rearing keeps:
    The Wamphyri are monstrous, warlike, jealous of their territories and possessions, forever scheming and feuding. There is nothing a vampire hates and distrusts more than another vampire. And no one they all hate and distrust more than The Dweller in His Garden in the West.
    Following a nightmare series of adventures and misadventures, a party of Travellers—including Jazz Simmons and the beautiful telepath Zek Foener—have joined forces with The Dweller. By the time Harry Keogh arrives, the Wamphyri have set aside all personal arguments and disputes to unite against their common enemy preparatory to invading the Garden, The Dweller’s territory in the hills. Of all the