Necroscope

In answer he sensed a nod. 'But if you were to use the future-time door,' said Vlady, 'you could go on beyond the end of your thread - to where it begins again!'

'Begins again?' Harry was baffled. 'Are you saying I'm to live again?'

'There's a second thread which is also you, Harry. It lives even now. All it lacks is mind.' And Vlady explained his meaning; he read Harry's future for him, just as he once read Boris Dragosani's. Except that where Harry had a future, Dragosani had only a past. And now, at last, Harry had all the answers.

'I owe you my thanks,' he told Vlady then.

'You owe me nothing,' said Vlady.

'But you came to me just in time,' Harry insisted, little realising the significance of his words.

'Time is relative,' the other shrugged, and chuckled. 'What will be, has been!'

'Thanks, anyway,' said Harry, and passed through the door to the Chateau Bronnitsy.

At 6:31 p.m. exactly, Dragosani's telephone came janglingly alive, causing him to start.

Outside it was dark now, made darker by snow falling heavily from a black sky. Searchlights in the Chateau's outer walls and towers swept the ground between the complex itself and the perimeter wall, as they had swept it since the fall of dark, but now their beams were reduced to mere swaths of grey light whose poor penetration was of little or no consequence,

Dragosani found it annoying that vision should be so reduced, but the Chateau's defences had more going for them than human eyesight alone; there were sensitive tripwires out there, the latest electronic detection devices, even a belt of anti-personnel mines in a circle just beyond the outbuilding pill-boxes.

None of which gave Dragosani any real sensation of security; Igor Vlady's predictions had ignored all such protections. In any case, the call did not come from the pill-boxes or the fortified perimeter: the men in their defensive positions were all equipped with hand radios. This call was either external or it came from a department within the Chateau itself.

Dragosani snatched the handset from its cradle, snapped, 'Yes, what is it?'

'Felix Krakovitch,' a trembling voice answered. 'I'm down in my lab. Comrade Dragosani, there's... something!' Dragosani knew the man: a seer, a minor prognosticator. His talent wasn't up to Vlady's standard by a long

shot, but neither was it to be ignored - not on this of all nights.

'Something?' Dragosani's nostrils flared. The man had put an eerie emphasis on the word. 'Make sense, Krakovitch! What's wrong?'

'I don't know, Comrade. It's just that... something's coming. Something terrible. No, it's here. It's here now!'

'What's "here"?' Dragosani snarled into the phone. 'Where, "here"?'

'Out there, in the snow. Belov feels it, too.'

'Belov?' Karl Belov was a telepath, and a good one over short distances. Borowitz had often used him at foreign embassy parties, picking up what he could from the minds of his hosts. 'Is Belov there with you now? Put him on.'

Belov was asthmatic. His voice was always soft and gasping, his sentences invariably short. Right now they were even more so: 'He's right, Comrade,' he gasped. 'There's a mind out there - a powerful mind!'

Keogh! It had to be him. 'Just one?' Dragosani's once-sensitive lips curled back from a mouthful of white daggers. His red eyes seemed to light from within. How Keogh had come here he couldn't say, but if he was alone he was a dead man - and to hell with that traitor Vlady's predictions!

On the other end of the line, Belov fought for air, struggled to find a means of expression.

'Well?' Dragosani hastened him.

'I ... I'm not sure,' said Belov. 'I thought there was only one, but now -'

'Yes?' Dragosani almost shouted. 'Damn it all! - am I surrounded by idiots? What is it, Belov? What's out there?'

Belov panted into the phone at his end, gasped, 'He's... calling. He's some sort of telepath himself, and he's calling.'

To you?' Dragosani's brows knitted in baffled frustration. His great nostrils sniffed suspiciously, anxiously, as if to draw the answer from the air itself.

'No, not to me. He's calling to ... to others. Oh, God - and they're beginning to answer him!'

'Who is answering him?' Dragosani barked. 'What's wrong with you, Belov? Are there traitors? Here in the Chateau.'

There came a clattering from the other end - a low moan and a thudding sound - then Krakovitch again: 'He has fainted, Comrade!'

'What?' Dragosani couldn't believe his ears. 'Belov, fainted? What the hell-?'

Lights were beginning to flicker on the call-sign panel of the radio Dragosani had had moved in here from the DO's control cell. A number of men with handsets were trying to contact him from their defensive positions. Next door Borowitz's secretary, Yul Galenski, sat nervously behind his desk, twitching as he listened to Dragosani's raging. And now the necromancer started bellowing for him:

'Galenski, are you deaf? Get in here. I need assistance!'

At that moment the DO burst in from the landing in the central stairwell. He carried weapons: stubby Kalashnikov machine-pistols. As Galenski started to his feet he said: 'You sit there. I'll go in.'

Without pause for knocking he almost ran into the other room, pulled up short, gasping, as he saw Dragosani crouched over the radio's panel of blinking lights. Dragosani had taken his glasses off. Snarling soundlessly at the radio, he seemed more like some hunched, half-crazy beast than a man.

Still staring in astonishment at the necromancer's face, his awful eyes, the DO dumped an armful of weapons onto a chair; as he did so, Dragosani said: 'Stop gawping!' He reached out a great hand and grabbed the DO's

shoulder, dragged him effortlessly towards the radio. 'Do you know how to operate this damned thing?'

'Yes, Dragosani,' the DO gulped, finding his voice. 'They are trying to speak to you.'

'I can see that, fool!' Dragosani snapped. 'Well then, speak to them. Find out what they want.'

The DO perched himself on the edge of a steel chair in front of the radio. He took up the handset, flipped switches, said: 'This is Zero. All call-signs acknowledge, over?'

The replies came in sharp, numerical succession: 'Call-sign One, OK, over.'

Two, OK, over.'

'Three, OK, over.' And so on rapidly through fifteen call-signs. The voices were tinny and there was some static, but over and above that they all seemed a little too shrill, all contained a ragged edge of barely controlled panic.

'Zero for call-sign One, send your message, over,' said the DO.

'One: there are things out in the snow!' the answer came back at once, One's voice crackling with static and mounting excitement. 'They're closing on my position! Request permission to open fire, over?'

'Zero for One: wait, out!' snapped the DO. He looked at Dragosani. The necromancer's red eyes were open wide, like clots of blood frozen in his inhuman face.

'No!' he snarled. 'First I want to know what we're dealing with. Tell him to hold his fire and give me a running commentary.'

White-faced, the DO nodded, passed on Dragosani's order, was glad that he wasn't stuck out there in a pillbox in the snow - but on the other hand, could that be any worse than being stuck in here with the madman Dragosani?

'Zero, this is One!' One's voice crackled out of the radio, almost hysterical with excitement now. 'They're coming in a semicircle out of the snow. In a minute they'll hit the mines. But they move so ... so slowly! There! One of them stepped on a mine! It blew him to bits - but the others keep coming! They're thin, ragged -they don't make any noise. Some of them have - swords?'

'Zero for One: you keep calling them "things". Aren't they men?'

One's radio procedure went out of the window. 'Men?' his voice was completely hysterical. 'Maybe they are men, or were - once. I think I'm insane! This is unbelievable!' He tried to get a grip on himself. 'Zero, I'm alone here and there are ... many of them. I request permission to open fire. I beg you! I must protect myself...'