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.
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 taunted him - but al in silence, like some hideous form of mime - while the fire ate at Harry's lower trunk. It was perhaps the cruelest thing that the dream-Harry had ever seen or could ever have imagined.
Perhaps too cruel -for even as an observer he was beginning to feel his own future agony!
Events speeded up, became a blur - a fury of fear, fire, arid frenzied flesh! - and light! Blinding light!
The Gate was its source: a bal of silently expanding but al-consuming light. It ate Shaithis, Karen, the Necroscope - the entire scene - and it sent the dream-Harry ...
... Elsewhen.
Again Harry and his future-self - the one a dreamer, and the other a physical if future reality - were in the metaphysical Mobius Continuum, hurtling down a past-timestream, rushing back through times that were long gone and forgoten, among the myriad blue, green and red life-threads of Sunside-Starside, into their remote beginnings.
And again the dream-Harry was the observer, who couldn't help but observe that his future self was dead. Neither asleep nor undead but dead, truly dead (in this manifestation any way), and gone forever ... or going. Going where no one would ever be able to find him, into the far past of an alien, paralel vampire world. But being the Necroscope, the dream-Harry knew that it wasn't like that: the body of his future self was dead, yes, but the mind would go on. Except this time ... wel, who could say where it would go to? Or perhaps this was the very end of the road, albeit right back at the beginning. A paradox - but wasn't everything?
Horrified, because he knew that this was or would be him, the dream-Harry watched his own future-corpse where it tumbled head over heels into past time.
Fire-blackened and smouldering - with its arms flung wide and its steaming head thrown back in the final agony of death -it was the one grim anomaly in a darkness shot through with the thin neon bars or ribbons of blue, green and red life-threads;