The Lost Years Vol 1, page 1
part #9 of Necroscope Series
HARRY KEOGH
A RESUME AND CHRONOLOGY
Christened ‘Snaith’ in Edinburgh in 1957, the infant Harry was the son of a psychic sensitive mother, Mary Keogh (herself the daughter of a gifted expatriate Russian lady), and Gerald Snaith, a banker. Harry’s father died of a stroke a year later, and in the winter of 1960 his mother remarried, this time to a Russian dissident, Viktor Shukshin. In the winter of ‘63 Shukshin murdered Harry’s mother by drowning her under the ice of a frozen river; he escaped punishment by alleging that while skating she’d crashed through the thin crust and been washed away. Shukshin inherited her isolated Bonnyrig house and the not inconsiderable monies left to her by her first husband.
Within six months the young Harry ‘Keogh’ had gone to live with an uncle and his wife at Harden on the north-east coast of England, an arrangement that was more than satisfactory to Viktor Shukshin, who could never stand the child.
Harry commenced schooling with the roughneck kids of the colliery; but a dreamy and introspective sort of boy, he was a loner, developed few friendships - not with his fellow pupils, anyway - and thus fell easy prey to bullying. Later, as he grew towards his teens, Harry’s daydreaming spirit, psychic insights and instincts led him into further conflict with his teachers.
His problem was that he had inherited his maternal forebears’ mediumistic talents, which were developing in him to an extraordinary degree. He had no requirement for ‘real’ or physical companions as such, because the many friends he already had were more than sufficient and willing to supply his every need. As to who his friends were - they were the myriad dead in their graves!
Up against the school bully, Harry defeated him with the telepathi-cally communicated skills of an Kt-ex-Army physical training instructor, an expert in unarmed combat. Punished with maths homework, he received extra tuition from an ex-Headmaster of the school. But here he required only a little help, for in fact he was something of a mathematician himself. Except Harry leaned more towards the metaphysical; his intuitive grasp of numbers was lateral to the point of sidereal; his numeracy was as alien to mundane science as his telepathic intercourse with the dead was to speech.
In 1969 Harry gained entry into a technical college, and until the end of his formal (and orthodox) education, did his best to tone down the use of his extraordinary talent-and be a ‘normal, average student.’ Aware that he must soon begin to support himself, he began writing, and by the time his schooling was at an end several short pieces of his fiction had seen print.
Three years later, he finished his first novel, Diary of a 17th-Century Rake. While the book fell short of the bestseller lists, still it did well. It wasn’t so much a sensation for its storyline as for its historical authenticity; hardly surprising considering the qualifications of Harry’s co-author and collaborator - namely a 17th-century rake, shot dead by an outraged husband in 1672!
By the summer of 1976, Harry had his own unassuming top-floor flat in an old three-storey house on the coast road out of Hartlepool towards Sunderland. Perhaps typically, the house stood opposite one of the town’s oldest graveyards; Harry was never short of friends to talk to. But by then, too, his headmaster of a few years ago had discovered his grotesque secret, and passed it on to others more secretive yet…
Blithely ignorant of the fact that he was now under wary scrutiny, Harry let his talent develop. He was the Necroscope, the only man who could talk to the dead and befriend them. Now that his weird talent was fully formed, he could converse with exanimate persons even over great distances; once introduced to a member of the Great Majority, thereafter he could always contact him again. With Harry, however, it was a point of common decency that whenever possible he would physically attend them at their gravesides; he wasn’t one to ‘shout’ at his friends.
In their turn (and in return for his friendship), Harry’s dead people loved him. He was like a pharos among them, the one shining light in an otherwise eternal darkness, their observatory on a world they’d thought left behind and gone forever. For contrary to the beliefs of the living, death is not The End but a transition to incorporeality and immobility. Great artists, when they die, continue to visualize magnificent canvases they can never paint; architects plan fantastic, continent-spanning cities, that can never be built; scientists follow up research they commenced in life but never had time to complete…
At his flat in Hartlepool, when he wasn’t working, Harry entertained his childhood sweetheart, Brenda. Shortly, finding herself pregnant, she became his wife. But a shadow out of the Necroscope’s past was rapidly becoming an obsession. He brooded over dreams of his poor drowned mother, and in nightmares revisited the frozen river where Mary Keogh had died before her time. Finally, Harry resolved to take revenge on his evil stepfather. In this as in all things he had the blessings of the dead, for knowing only too well the horror of death, cold-blooded murder was a crime the teeming dead could never tolerate.
In the winter of 1976-77 Harry tempted Viktor Shukshin out onto the ice of the frozen river to skate with him, as once the murderer had skated with his mother. But his plan backfired and they both crashed through the ice into the bitterly cold water. The Russian had the strength of a madman; he would surely drown his stepson… but no, for at the last moment Mary Keogh - or what remained of her - rose from her watery grave to drag her murderer down!
And with that Harry had discovered a new talent; or rather, he now knew how far the teeming dead would go in order to protect him - knew that in fact they would rise from their graves for him…
The Necroscope’s weird abilities had not gone unnoticed; a top-secret British intelligence organization known as E-Branch (‘£’ for ‘ESP’ or ESPionage), and its Soviet counterpart, were both aware of his powers. But he was no sooner approached to join E-Branch than its head, his contact, was taken out, ‘with extreme prejudice,’ by Boris Dragosani, a Romanian spy and necromancer. Dragosani’s terrible ‘talent’ lay in ripping open the bodies of dead enemy agents to steal their secrets right out of their violated brains, blood, and guts!
Harry vowed to track Dragosani down and even the score, and the Great Majority offered him their help. Of course they did, for even the dead weren’t safe from a man who violated corpses! What Harry and his friends couldn’t know was that Dragosani had been infected with vampirism. What was more, he had murdered a colleague, the Mongol Max Batu, to learn the secret of his evil eye. The necromancer could now kill at a glance!
Time was short; Harry must follow the vampire back to the USSR, to Soviet E-Branch Headquarters at the Chateau Bronnitsy south of Moscow, and there put him down… but how? A British ‘precog’ - an esper whose talent enabled him to scan fragments of the future - had foreseen the Necroscope’s involvement not only with vampires but also with the twisted figure 8 or ‘eternity’ symbol of the Mobius Strip. In order to get to Dragosani, Harry first must understand the Mobius connection. But here at least he was on familiar ground; the astronomer and mathematician August Ferdinand Mobius had been dead since 1868 - and the dead would do anything for Harry Keogh…
In Leipzig Harry visited Mobius’s grave and discovered him at work on his space-time equations. What he had done in life he continued, undisturbed, to do in death; and in the course of a century he had reduced the physical universe to a set of mathematical symbols. Mobius knew how to bend space-time! Teleportation: an easy route into the Chateau Bronnitsy.
For days Mobius instructed Harry, until the Necroscope was sure that the answer lay right there in front of him - just an inch beyond his grasp. But the East German GREPO (the Grenz Polizei) were watching him, and on the orders of Dragosani tried to arrest him at Mobius’s graveside… where suddenly Mobius’s equations transformed themselves into doorways into the strange immaterial universe of the Mobius Continuum! Using one of these doors to escape from the GREPO, finally Harry was able to project himself into the grounds of Soviet E-Branch HQ.
Calling up from their graves an army of long-dead Crimean Tartars, the Necroscope destroyed the chateau’s defences, then sought out and killed Dragosani. But in the fight he, too, was killed… his body died; but in the last moment his mind, his will, transferred to the metaphysical Mobius Continuum.
And riding the Mobius Strip into future time, Harry’s identity was absorbed into the as yet unformed infant mentality - of his own son!
August 1977
Drawn to Harry Jr’s all-absorbing mind like an iron filing to a magnet, Harry Keogh’s identity was in danger of being entirely subsumed and wiped clean. His only avenue of freedom lay in the Mobius Continuum, which he could only use when his infant son was asleep. But while exploring the infinite future timestream, Harry had noted among the myriad blue life-threads of Mankind a scarlet thread: another vampire! Worse than this, in the near future he’d seen that red thread crossing the innocent blue of young Harry’s!
The Necroscope investigated. He was incorporeal, yes, but so were the teeming dead; he could still communicate with them, and they were still in his debt. In September of 1977 he spoke to the spirit of Thibor Ferenczy - once a vampire - at his tomb in the Carpathian Mountains; also to Thibor’s ‘father’, Faethor Ferenczy, who died in a World War II bombing raid on Ploiesti.
Harry was cautious. Even when dead, vampires are the worst possible liars, devious beyond measure. But the Necroscope had nothing to lose (literally), and the vampires had much to gain; Harry was their last contact with a world they had once planned to rule. Thus, by trial and error, playing oh so dangerous cat-and-mouse word-games with the Wamphyri, he pieced together the terrible truth: that in the late 1950s Thibor had ‘infected’ a pregnant English woman, Georgina Bodescu, who later gave birth to a son. And Thibor’s spawn, Yulian Bodescu, was the source of the threatening red thread!
In Romania, Alec Kyle and Felix Krakovitch, current heads of their respective ESP-ionage rings, joined forces to destroy the remains of Thibor in his Carpathian mausoleum. There they burned a monstrous remnant of the vampire, but not before Thibor sent Yulian 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, little 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 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 hell, 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 all intents and purposes, and to anyone who didn’t know better, 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? Finally, 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 different 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 follows concerns itself mainly with certain episodes of the Necroscope’s life, between the previously chronicled Wamphyri! and The Source. But it is not alone Harry Keogh’s story. For without that the Wamphyri were there before him (and despite the paradox of their springing from him), it could even be said that Harry himself would not have been necessary: without a disease there’s no need for a cure. In short, this story is also theirs: part of the lost history of the Wamphyri…
PROLOGUE
The powerful, silver-grey stretch limo, familiar in itself however unusual - but less than unique - on an island of ancient Fiats and sputtering Lambrettas, bumped carefully over shifting cobbles under a baroque stone archway into the courtyard of Julio’s Cafe and Restaurant in the eastern quarter of Palermo. The lone survivor of a World War II bombing raid, the walled enclosure was once the smallest of four gardens containing a middling villa. The other three gardens were rubble-strewn craters; only their outer walls had been repaired, to create something of an acceptable fagade in the district of the Via Delia Magione.
The courtyard was set out like a fan-shaped checker-board: square tables decked with white covers, standing on black flags of volcanic stone; the whole split down the middle by a ‘hinge’ of vehicles parked herringbone-fashion on what was once a broad carriageway. A palm-fringed gap in the wall at the point of the quadrant marked the vehicular exit into the dusky evening.
Some three dozen patrons sat eating, drinking, chattering, though not too energetically; a pair of sweating, white-aproned waiters ran to and fro between the tables, the bar and kitchens, each serving his own triangle of customers. Even for the third week in May the weather was unseasonably warm; at eight-thirty in the evening the temperature was up in the high seventies.
The east-facing wall of the courtyard contained what was left of the old villa: a two-storeyed wing three rooms wide and three deep, with a balcony supported by Doric columns that more than hinted of better times. The central, ground-floor room was fronted by a marble bar which spanned the gap between the pillars; kitchens to the left of the bar stood open to the inspection of patrons. Amazingly, in this bombed-out relic of a place, wide arches in the wall to the right displayed the sweep of the original grand marble staircase winding to the upper rooms and balcony. Better times indeed!
On the balcony - whose tables were reserved for ‘persons of quality’ - Julio Sclafani himself leaned out as far as his belly would allow to observe the arrival of these latest, most elevated of all his customers: Anthony and Francesco Francezci, come down from the high Madonie especially to eat at Julio’s.
It was wonderful that they came here, these men of power, ignoring the so-called ‘class’ restaurants to dine on Julio’s simple but worthy fare. And they’d been doing it for six weeks now, ever since the first signs of improvement in the weather. Or… perhaps it was that one of them, or even both of them, had noticed Julio’s Julietta? For Sclafani’s youngest, still unmarried daughter was a stunner after all. And the Brothers Francezci were eminently eligible men…
But what a shame that she wasn’t at her best! It must be the pollution of Palermo’s air. The fumes of all the cars and mopeds, the stagnation of all the derelict places, the breathing of dead air and the winter damp that came drifting in off the Tyrrhenian Sea. But spring was here and summer on its way; Julietta would bloom again, just as the island was blooming.
Except… it was worrying, the way she’d come down with - well, with whatever it was - just four or five weeks ago; since when all of the colour had seemed to go out of her, all the joy and vitality, everything that had made her the light of Julio’s life. To be back there on her couch, all exhausted, with an old biddy of a sick-nurse sitting beside her - ‘in attendance,’ as it were - as at someone’s deathbed! What, Julietta? Perish the thought! As fof the old crow: Julio supposed he should consider himself lucky to have obtained her services so reasonably. All thanks to the Francezcis, for she was one of theirs.
