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.