Necroscope 9: The Lost Years by Brian Lumley Page A

power had been taken away from him! He was no longer master of Mobius spacetime! Again Harry knew this without knowing how he knew. His deadspeak was still available to him, but…
    … Deadspeak? Since when had it been called that!? But no, he mustn’t attempt to remember that which had not yet happened! Best if he simply accept it: that while the Mobius Continuum was no longer a viable proposition, still he had his deadspeak, his ability to talk to the dead. Wherefore, why not use it? Why not ask them - the teeming dead, the Great Majority - what all of this was about?
    Too late! Janos’s torch touched down and fire came racing in a blue-glaring blaze! Searing heat gouted up in a whooshing tongue of shimmering flame, roaring into the chimney overhead. Liquid fire singed the hair from Harry’s head and face and set his clothes ablaze.
    Leaping erect, he cavorted like a human torch!
    Until yet again -perhaps mercifully this time - he felt himself snatched a little way into the future …
    … To where he stood in antique ruins as dark as night, yet clear as daylight to him! For while he was scarcely aware of it, the Necroscope was a changeling now; an alien Thing was inside him.
    He waited warily, patiently in the ruins of Castle Ferenczy; waited there with … with a dead man! With the resurrected Thracian warrior, Bodrogk.
    Briefly, momentarily, flickeringly, Harry knew why they were here. His precognition told him that much, at least. And in a little while two women came up from below. One was Sofia, Bodrogk’s wife of centuries, who flew into her husband’s arms. Both Sofia and Bodrogk were dead; they had been called up from their ashes. But they were not as dead as the other woman! She was Sandra and was or had been Harry’s woman - and later Janos Ferenczy’s! The difference now was all too obvious.
    Brian Lumley
    Necroscope: The Lost Years - Vol. I
    34
    35
     
    ForSandra came ghosting in the way of vampire thralls, her yelow eyes alive in the night. But Harry knew in his way that she was less than Sandra now. Or more. Once she had loved, or lusted after him, for himself; now she would lust after al men -for their blood!
    She flew into his arms, sobbed into his neck. And holding her tightly -as much to steady himself as to steady her - he looked over her salow shoulder to where Bodrogk and Sofia embraced. If only their embrace could be the same. But of course, it couldn’t. For Sandra’s beautiful, near-naked body was cold as clay where it pressed against him, and Harry knew there was no way he could ever warm it.
    She sensed his intention and drew back a little, but not far enough. His thin sharp stake, a splinter of old oak, drove up under her breast and into her heart.
    She took a final gasping breath, a staggering step away from him, and fell.
     
    Bodrogk, seeing Harry’s anguish, did the rest.
    And Harry jumped again …
    This time it was diferent, for the dream-Harry wasn’t in it. Or he was, but stood apart from it, watching it happen to his future-self. Which was probably just as wel, for surely this had to be the end of him? Yet despite that in this instance he was merely an observer, still he was given to understand something of what was happening … and wished that he wasn’t.
    For in Starside, close to the glaring hemisphere Gate, the Necroscope Harry Keogh was burning. A vampire, finally he paid a vampire’s price for a fatal mistake: to have let himself get too close to the Wamphri!
    He burned inside and out: fire on the outside, and a burning, consuming hatred within. For Shaithis, who even now took the Lady Karen (but Karen …?) by force right there in front of Harry’s cross. She seemed exhausted where Shaithis savaged and ravaged her; she resisted not at al as he tore at her.
    The dream-Harry would go to their assistance … except he was rooted to the spot. He was an observer, forbidden to interfere. And as the flames licked higher around the Necroscope’s funeral pyre, so Shaithis