Deadspawn

Shaithis tried to separate from her... Another second and he might succeed... Too late!

Goodbye, Harry, she said.

And the darkness of Starside was split by a single flash of light, accompanied by a detonation only slightly muffled by the flesh and bone which it turned to grey and crimson pulp!

As the red spray settled and their headless, shuddering bodies fell apart, Shaitan flowed forward to stand over them. He ignored Karen, saw only the shell of Shaithis. And reaching a clawed tentacle into the shattered cavity of his descendant's neck, Shaitan drew out his whipping, decapitated leech; drew it out and hurled it into the heart of the bonfire - and laughed! For Shaithis had no head, no brain. And Shaitan had no body. Not the body he wanted, anyway. Not yet!

'You fool,' he told the empty shell of flesh. 'And would you set your warrior on me? We were of one blood, you and I, but my grip on the minds of creatures such as these was ever greater than yours! Close on three thousand years I listened to old Kehrl Lugoz moaning in his ice-encased sleep, cursing me in his dreams. Did you think I would not notice when suddenly he stopped?

'Ah, he cursed me, but he was craven, too. Did you really think to inspire your construct with his hatred and passions? What? Old Kehrl? He had no passion, not any longer! And as for "hatred"...'

He turned and hurled a mental dart at Shaithis's warrior, which at once reared up and shrank back, mewling. 'You do not know the meaning of the word! What, hatred? And how I have hated you If I had let my jealousy loose... why, I could have killed you a hundred times! But never so sweetly as this.'

He flowed up to Shaithis, picked up his loosely flopping corpse and hugged it close. And Shaitan's black, corrugated flesh began to crack open down all its length, like a wrinkled nut displaying its soft kernel. Within the cavity of his ancient trunk, a smaller, more flexible and yet more durable version of himself - the original vampire - was waiting, as it had waited these thousands of years. But Shaitan's plan, to join with flesh of his flesh and so be renewed, was not to be.

For the two Harrys had sent out word of their agony not only into Starside, Earth and all the worlds beyond, but also into the spaces between them. Their travails were known by all the teeming dead, and their warnings had been heard by Others who were not dead and never can be.

In the same moment, Shaitan and the Necroscope sensed the One Great Truth. Harry knew, and Shaitan... finally he remembered!

'Ahhhh!' The Fallen One gasped, staggered by the memory. Even as his vampire struggled to be free of the old shell and into Shaithis, so its eyes where they were housed within his cowl looked up at Harry Keogh, burning on his cross. Shaitan looked at his face framed in fire, and knew where he had seen it before!

But now he saw (or sensed rather than saw, it was that swift) something else. Something that flashed silver out of the Gate's white glare, and then became an even greater glare as a nuclear sun burst over Starside briefly to rival the dawn. And between the coming of the exorcet and the bursting of its all-consuming warhead, Shaitan saw something else: a sight which might have drawn one last, long sigh from that Prime Evil's throat... except he was no more.

It was Harry's cross, but empty now and pierced by the spears of a great light, where at last it was blasted to atoms...

Epilogue

Death: Harry wondered why he'd feared it. For of all men, the Necroscope had known it wasn't like that. Because he had been there before. Incorporeal, bodiless as any dead thing whose flesh has finally failed, he was now free of all that. Except that in his case it seemed a mundane death wasn't part of the scenario.

He had always known that death wasn't the end: that whatever a man pursues in life, he will keep pursuing in his afterlife continuation. Harry Keogh had been the master of the Möbius Continuum; so it was hardly a surprise to find himself there now, in Möbius time, hurtling back among the blue, green, and red threads of Starside into their remote past. A surprise ... no, but strange anyway, for in the end he had not conjured a door. He had not contrived an escape.

Which could only mean that he'd been... rescued?

But by Whom? And if indeed Someone or Ones had seen fit to save his incorporeal mind, what possible purpose could He or They have with his burned, vampiric body? For as Harry shot back into Starside's past, he saw his separate, smoking corpse tumbling alongside, winding back on its scarlet thread to his point of entry into Starside, and then plunging on beyond it. And he went with it, but incorporeal, apart, speeding blindly into times he'd never physically known.

As for his ruined shell's destination - and his own, for that matter - and the question of Who was their guide...

Harry had never in his life been one hundred per cent sure, positive sure, about God or a god. But back there in Starside he'd sensed the arrival, the presence of a Power, and had known that Shaitan sensed it, too. Moreover, he had known the source of that Power, and also that Möbius and Pythagoras before him had been right.

Now... Harry and his exanimate shell were mere impulses in the Mind he had called the 'Möbius Continuum' , integers in the infinite matrix of the Great Unknowable Equation. And he wasn't afraid when at long last that Mind itself spoke to him:

Things have uses, Harry, always. What use to create, if your efforts are only to be wasted? Sometimes we succeed, and sometimes we fail. But there are always uses for the best, and for the worst, of our works.

Harry couldn't tell if an answer had been invited, and in any case he didn't really have one. But he did have a question, however brief. 'God?'

He sensed a vast shrug. A creator, an adviser, an angel? God is... let's say He's a few steps higher up the ladder. His mind, as you know, is vast! We carry His thoughts, expedite His wishes. As best we can.

'I've had my doubts,' Harry admitted.

So do we, sometimes. So did Shaitan, when he was one of us... Except he would have tried to convince everyone that he was right, throughout all the Universes of Light! He would have forced their belief- in him!

Harry believed he understood. And understanding should have been enough. But because he was or had been human - and because he saw that his course was veering, angling away from his tumbling corpse - even now he was curious. So that he asked, 'What now?'

Your feet are on the first few rungs. You've made your point, chosen your course and stuck to it. You are a success story. We don't believe in waste; certainly we wouldn't waste someone as valuable as you! Like Shaitan, you won't remember, but you will know!' Except where he knew only a great darkness, you shall know light. In all of your worlds.

'All of my... ?'

Wherever you manifest. For His worlds are infinite as His thoughts.

'And... that?' Harry indicated his blackened shell where it grew small, tumbling towards some undefined purpose.

Causes have effects, and effects causes. Nothing may come to pass which has not passed before. The world of Sunside and Starside was a failure where evil won. So maybe a second chance is in order. Also it will occupy Shaitan, who has balanced himself against light in a great many worlds. Here... he begins again, on the bottom rung. For as you well know, Harry Keogh, what will be has been. Time is relative.

Harry's turn to shrug. With no vampire in him, he was i