Afterwards, Harry Keogh visited Karen in the grimly forbidding aerie which was her place. She was not long a vampire; the thing within her had not yet gained full ascendancy; if the Necroscope could drive out her vampire and destroy it … perhaps there was yet a chance for Harry Jr.
Harry’s method was crude, cruel, even brutal – but hideously effective. Except . . . how could he have foreseen the consequences? Karen had been Wamphyri! And now? Without her vampire she was nothing but a pretty, empty girl. Where was her power, her freedom, her raw, unfettered Wamphyri spirit now? Gone.
And when Harry awoke from his exhaustion, gone too was Karen!
From on high he saw her body wrapped in the white sheath she wore for a gown, bloody and broken on the flanks of her aerie, where she had thrown herself down from the uppermost levels.
The Dweller saw what his father had done, and knew why. If Harry Sr had found a cure for Karen, he might well have applied the principle to Harry Jr, too. Fearing that one day his father might return to Starside with just such a ‘cure’, The Dweller used his superior vampire powers to reduce Harry’s skills to nothing. He took away his deadspeak (his ability to talk to the dead) and also his numeracy. And then he returned Harry Keogh, ex-Necroscope, to his own world, the world of men . . .
Forbidden to speak to the dead – a rule he must obey or else suffer terrible mental and physical agony – and denied the use of the Möbius Continuum as a result of his enforced innumeracy, Harry Keogh was as close as he had ever been to being a ‘normal’ man. Which, after what he had known, equated almost to a prefrontal lobotomy. He had been the Necroscope – and was now powerless.
But although incapable of conscious communication with the teeming dead, still they could speak to him in his dreams. And their message was monstrous. Another Great Vampire had come to stalk the world!
Harry had dedicated himself to the eradication of vampirism; but what could he, ex-Necroscope, do now? As the world’s foremost expert on vampires, he could at least advise. He must do something, for unless he and E-Branch found the vampire first, then sooner or later the undead monster would surely find him! For Harry had grown into a legend: he was the vampire-slayer, and locked in his ‘crippled’ mind were all the secrets of the Great Majority and mathematical formulae governing the Möbius Continuum itself. If the born-again monster should use its necromancy to steal his forbidden metaphysical talents . . . the result would be unthinkable!
The dead, forbidden to talk to Harry except in his dreams, rallied to him. They used other methods to get their messages across: to tell him that a vampire was at work in the islands of the Aegean. Once more in league with E-Branch, Harry Keogh and the girl who loved him went out to the Mediterranean to see what could be done.
But two British espers had already been vampirized and their esoteric talents added to those of Janos Ferenczy, the bloodson of Faéthor and ‘brother’ to Thibor, the old Thing In The Ground. Janos was back to reclaim his territories and dig up again certain antique treasure-hoards which he himself had long ago buried as a safeguard against the changes which centuries of immobility in undeath would bring, treasures which would lie lost in the earth until his planned ‘resurrection’. These preparations had been made back in the fifteenth century, when Janos had known that his powerful vampire father, Faéthor, was returning again to Wallachia after almost three hundred years of bloodthirsty adventuring with the Crusaders, then with Genghis Khan, and finally with the Moslems. For Faéthor hated Janos and would try to ‘kill’ him (as he had already put down his brother, Thibor, undead into the earth), for which reason Janos had made these provisions against an uncertain future.
When Harry saw what he was up against with Janos, and after the vampire had taken Harry’s woman for his own, then he knew he must somehow regain his dead-speak and his command over the mysterious Möbius Continuum. Without these powers … he just wouldn’t stand a chance.