Necroscope 9: The Lost Years Read Free Page A

dream-message and a warning. Thibor had hoped to use his English ‘son’ as a vessel in which to rise up again and resume his vampire existence. But since his last physical vestiges were now destroyed, instead he would use him to take revenge on the Necroscope, Harry Keogh.
    As for killing Keogh: that should be the very simplest of things. The Necroscope was incorporeal, a bodiless id, his own infant son’s sixth sense. Only remove the child and the father would go with him …
    Meanwhile in the USSR, Alec Kyle stood falsely accused of murder. Russian espers were using a combination of high technology and ESP to drain him of knowledge … literally all knowledge! This process would leave him raped of his mind, brain-dead, and physical death would soon follow. And in England Yulian Bodescu was on the prowl. Intent on destroying Harry Jr, he headed for Hartlepool.
    His trail was bloody and littered with dead men when finally he entered the house where Brenda Keogh lived and climbed the stairs to her garret flat. The mother tried to protect her small child … she was hurled aside! … Harry Jr was awake; his mind contained Harry Keogh … the monster was upon them, powerful hands reaching!
    Harry could do nothing. Trapped in the infant’s whirlpool id, he knew that they were both going to die. But then: Go, litle Harry told 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! Harry was free; the mental attraction binding him to his son’s mind had been relaxed; he could now flee into the Mobius Continuum.
    And what the father could do, the son could do in spades; he was a Necroscope of enormous power! And in the cemetery just across the road, the dead answered Harry Jr’s call. They came up out of their graves, shuffled and flopped from the graveyard into the house and up the stairs. Bodescu the vampire attempted his first and last metamorphosis: adopting the shape of a great bat, he flew from a window … and took a crossbow bolt in his spine.
    And as he crashed down within the grounds of the cemetery, so the incorporeal Necroscope instructed the dead in the methods of eradication: the stake, decapitation, the cleansing fire …
    Harry Keogh was free, but free to do what? He was a mind without a body. Except he now felt a different force, an attraction other than his infant son’s magnet id, a vacuum seemingly eager to be filled. Exploring 8
    Brian Lumley
     
    it, Harry was sucked in irresistibly - into the aching emptiness of Alex Kyle’s drained mind!
    Employing ultra-high explosives to blow the Chateau Bronnitsy to hel, and his powers as a Necroscope to correct other anomalies, at last Harry could take the Mobius route home. His work, for the moment, was at an end. It was the late autumn of 1977, and he had taken up permanent residence in another man’s body.
    Indeed, to al intents and purposes, and to anyone who didn’t know beter, he was that other man! But he was also the natural father of a most unnatural child, a child with awesome supernatural powers.
    So now Harry must face up to other, more mundane duties: those of a husband and father. But how might he perform those duties with the face and form of a different man? What of his poor wife, Brenda, who had already suffered more than her fair share of strangeness and horror? How could he ask her to share her life with a husband who wasn’t the man she knew? Finaly, what of the child … if Harry Jr could still be considered a child?
    But perhaps the most difficult questions the Necroscope must ask himself were these: how much greater than his own talents were his son’s? How diferent were they? And perhaps more importantly: how did he intend to use them? Thus the world of Harry Keogh was a vastly complicated place—
    —Which wasn’t about to get any simpler …
    The story that folows concerns itself mainly with certain episodes of the Necroscope’s