Harry was behind him again. You're finished, Yulian, he told him then, with a deal of satisfaction. Whatever evil you've created, we can undo it. We can't give life back to those you've destroyed, but we can give some of them their revenge.
‘We?' The vampire spoke round the snake in his mouth, his words dripping like acid. ‘There's no "we", there's only you. And if it takes me forever, I'll —‘
You don't have forever. Harry shook his head. In fact, you've no time left at all!
There was a soft but concerted shuffling of footsteps on the landing and up the stairs; something, no, a good many somethings, were coming into the flat. Yulian swept out of the tiny bedroom into the flat's main room and skidded to a halt. Brenda Keogh no longer lay where he had tossed her, but Yulian barely noticed that.
The Keogh manifestation, suspended in thin air, moved after the vampire to watch the confrontation.
A policeman, his throat torn out, was leading them. And with steps slow and staggering, but full of purpose, they came on. You can kill the living, Yulian, Harry told the mewling vampire, but you can't kill the dead.
‘You...‘ Yulian turned to' him again. ‘You called them up!'
No, Harry shook his head. My son called them up. He must have been talking to them for quite some little time. And they've grown to care for him as much as they care for me.
‘No!' Bodescu rushed to the window, saw that it was old and no longer opened. One of the corpses, a thing that shed maggots with every step, lurched after him. In its bony hand it carried Darcy Clarke's crossbow. Others had long wooden staves, taken from cemetery fences. Animated corruption was now spewing into the room like pus from a ruptured boil.
It's all over, Yulian, said Harry.
Bodescu turned on them all, scowled his denial. No, it wasn't over yet. What were they anyway but a mirage and a mob of dead men? ‘Keogh, you bodiless bastard!' he snarled. ‘And did you think you were the only one with powers?'
He crouched down, spread his shoulders, laughed in their faces. His neck elongated, the flesh rippling with a life of its own. His terrible head was now like that of some primal pterodactyl. His body seemed to flutter, flattening in depth and increasing in width until his clothes, unable to contain it, tore into so many rags around him. He reached out his arms and lengthened them, forming a blasphemous cross, then grew a webbing of wing down each side of his body. With greater ease, more fluency far than ever Faethor Ferenczy had possessed, he completely remoulded his vampire flesh. And where moments before a manlike being had stood, now a huge batlike creature confronted its hunters.
Then... the thing that was Yulian Bodescu turned and launched itself at the thin-latticed panes of the wide bay window.
Don't let him get away! Harry told them; but without need, for that wasn't their intention.
Yulian went out through the latticework, showering glass and fragments of painted woodwork down into the road. Now he formed an aerofoil, curving his monstrous body like a straining kite to catch a night wind blowing up from the west. But the avenger with the crossbow stood in the gap of the broken window and aimed his weapon. A corpse without eyes should not see, but in their weird pseudolife these pieces of crumbling flesh enjoyed all of the senses they'd known in life. And this one had been a marksman.
He fired, and the bolt took Yulian in his spine, halfway down his rubbery back. The heart, Harry admonished. You should have gone for his heart. But in the end, it was all to work out the same.
Yulian cried out, the raucous, ringing cry of a wounded beast. He bent his body in a contortion of agony, lost his control, sank like a crippled bird towards the graveyard. He tried to maintain his fight, but the bolt had severed his spine and that would take time to mend. There was no time left. Yulian fell into the cemetery, crashing into the damp shrubbery; and at once the crumbling dead turned in their tracks and began to file out of the garret flat, shuffling in pursuit.
Down the stairs they went, some with their flesh sloughing from their bones, and others who couldn't help but leave bits behind, which followed of their own accord. Harry went with them, with all of the dead he'd befriended, oh — how long ago? — when he'd lived here, and new friends he hadn't even spoken to yet.
There were two young policemen among them, who'd never return home to their wives; and another two from Special Branch, with bullet holes like scarlet flowers blooming in their clothing; and there was a fat man called Guy Roberts, whose head wasn't much of anything any more but whose heart was in the right place. Roberts had come to Hartlepool with a job to do, which he expected to finish right now.
Down the stairs, out of the door and across the road they all went, and into the graveyard. There were plenty of stragglers there who hadn't made it over the road to the flat, who simply weren't in any condition to do so. But when Yulian had fallen they'd ringed him about, advancing on him with their staves and threatening in their mute, mouldering way.
Through the heart, Harry told them when he arrived.
Damn it, Harry, but he won't keep still! one of them protested. His hide's like rubber, too, and these staves are blunt.
Maybe this is the answer. Another corpse, recently dead, came forward. This was Constable Dave Collins, who walked all aslant because Yulian had broken his back in an alley not a hundred yards down the road. In his hands he carried the cemetery caretaker's sickle, a little rusty from lying in the long grass under the graveyard wall.
That's the way, Harry agreed, ignoring Yulian's hoarse screaming. The stake, the sword, and the fire.
I've got the last. Someone whose head had collapsed utterly, Guy Roberts, stumbled forward dragging heavy tanks and a hose — an army flame-thrower! And if Yulian had screamed before, now he did so in earnest. The dead payed him no heed. They piled onto him and held him down, and in his extreme of terror — even Yulian Bodescu, terrified — he reshaped his vampire body to that of a man. It was a mistake, for now they could find his heart more easily. One of them brought a piece of a broken headstone for a hammer, and at last a stave was driven home. Pinned down like some ugly butterfly, Yulian writhed and shrieked, but it was nearly over now.
Dave Collins, looking on, sighed and said, An hour ago I was a policeman, and now it seems I'm to be an executioner.
It's a unanimous verdict, Dave, Harry reminded him.
And like the Grim Reaper himself, so Dave Collins advanced and took Yulian's hideous head as cleanly as possible, even though he had to strike more than once or twice. After that it was Guy Roberts's turn; he worked on the now silent vampire with roaring, gouting, blistering, cleansing fire until there was really nothing much left of him at all. And he didn't stop until his tanks were empty. By then the dead were dispersing, back to their riven graves.
It was time for Harry to move on. The wind had blown Yulian's fog away, the stench of putrefaction, too, and stars were shining in the night sky. Harry's work was finished here, but elsewhere there was still a great deal to be done.
He thanked the dead, one and all, and found a Möbius door.
Harry was almost used to the Möbius continuum now, but he suspected that most human minds would find it unendurable. For it was always nowhere and nowhen on the space-time Möbius strip; but a man with the right equations, the right sort of mind, could use it to ride anywhere and everywhen. Before that, of course, he would need to conquer his fear of the dark.
For in the physical universe there are degrees of darkness, and Nature seems to abhor all of them much as she abhors a vacuum. The metaphysical Möbius continuum, however, is made of darkness. That is all it consists of. Beyond the Möbius doors lies the very Primal Darkness itself, which existed before the material universe began.