The Source by Brian Lumley

‘You’ve done … so much!’ Harry Keogh told his son, where he walked with him along the edge of a plot shady with sweet corn grown tall. ‘All of this is nothing short of . . . astonishing!’

Harry Jnr had heard much the same thing from Zek Foener, Jazz Simmons, every Traveller who ever made it here; it was a common reaction to things he’d come to take for granted. ‘Not really,’ he answered. ‘Not set against what I’m capable of doing. Chiefly I wanted a place to live, for myself and for my mother. So it had to be made liveable. And what is it really but a strip of fertile soil some two hundred or more yards long by eighty wide, eh? As for the running of the place, the Travellers do that for me.’

‘But the buildings,’ Harry said, as he’d said it so often during the course of the past sunup. ‘Oh, I know they’re only bungalows, but they’re so, well, beautiful! They’re simple but delightful. The great span of their arches, the delicate buttresses, the cut of the roof timbers. They’re not Greek, not anything I can put a finger on, just so pleasing. And all built by these . . . well, by these cave-dwellers of yours!’

The trogs are people, father,’ Harry Jnr smiled. ‘But the Wamphyri never gave them a chance to develop, that’s all. They’re no more primitive than your Australian bushmen, all considered. But on the other hand they’re eager to learn. Show them a principle or a system and they catch on quick. Also, they’re grateful. Their old gods didn’t treat them too well, and I do. As for the architecture which so impresses you: well, that surprises me. Surely you realize that I’m not the designer? I got all this from a Berliner who died back in 1933. A Bauhaus student who never did make it when he was alive, but he’s designed some beautiful stuff since then. I’m a Necroscope, like you, remember? All of the very simple, very efficient systems you see in use here were given to me by the dead of your own world! Don’t you realize how far you could have gone, the things you could have done, if you hadn’t spent the last eight years of your life tracking me?’

Harry shook his head, still a little dazed by what his son had shown him, by what he’d been told. ‘See,’ he finally said, perhaps a little desperately, ‘that’s another thing. Eight years, you said. Now, in my mind you’re a boy, an eight-year-old boy. In fact I’ve prided myself in picturing you that way, in imagining what you’d be like. It would have been far easier to think of you as a baby, which is how I remember you. But I made myself see you as you’d be now – or as I thought you’d be. And . . . and just look how you are! I still can’t get over it.’ He shook his head again.

‘I’ve explained that.’

‘What, how you tricked me?’ Harry didn’t try to disguise the bitterness in his tone. ‘How you not only crossed the divide between universes but displaced yourself in time, too? You went back in time! Long before you were born, and long before I lost you, while I was growing up you were growing up too – here! Just exactly how old are you, anyway?’

‘I’m twenty-four, Harry.’

Harry nodded, sharply. ‘Your mother’s now fifteen years my senior! Not that she’d recognize me, anyway. And . . . and you have looked after her. That was always one of my biggest worries: that she be looked after. But through all of those years I didn’t know! Couldn’t you have let me know, just once?’

‘And prolong the agony, Harry? So that you’d always be there, just one step behind us?’

Harry grimaced, turned away. ‘I noticed you’ve skipped the “father” bit, too. You’re a man, not the boy I expected. You wear that damned golden mask, so that I can’t even see your face. You’re … a stranger! Yes, we’re like strangers. Well, I suppose that’s the way it had to be. I mean, we’re hardly father and son, are we? Let’s face it, I’m not all that much older than you, now am I?’