Necroscope: The Plague-Bearer by Brian Lumley Page A

condition, receive final orders and certain items of latent equipment, and then journey on to Scotland and the task in hand. Less than a fortnight, yes; but once the brothers had supplied him with The Chemist’s address, he’d been there inside twenty-four hours!
    Now in this shabby, cheap hotel room in Scotland’s capital, as night settled more surely on the ancient city’s streets, his thoughts were bitter as bile as he recalled to mind his time in The Chemist’s lonely Bulgarian villa in a densely forested area some miles from Gabrovo in the Balkans…
     

     
    Mike had flown to Sofia, hired a car and driven one hundred and twenty miles to Kazanlak and on through the Shipka Pass to Gabrovo. From Gabrovo a large-scale local map of the region’s frequently trackless mountain forests had seen him to the gates of a stone-walled private estate located in a valley between spurs radiating from the craggy spine of the Balkan Mountains: all of this travelling done by night—the night following his ordeal at Le Manse Madonie—so that it was almost dawn by the time of Mike’s arrival at his destination.
    From a distance the iron gates had appeared rusted, in part ivy-grown. But as a security camera situated in one of the high wall’s buttresses detected Mike’s approaching vehicle, and after he had halted the car, stepping out into a swirling ground mist and a probing light beam from a verandah under the jutting roof of the gloomy house at the end of the drive, then the gates had been activated, causing them to swing open on well-oiled hinges. For of course Mike had been expected.
    Having parked on a gravel-strewn hard-standing close to the house—a chalet-like wooden structure half hidden in the shade of close-towering, guardian evergreens—a place that seemed in excellent order, despite age-darkened timbers and the mistiness rising from some nearby stream—Mike had climbed the steps of an oak-boarded stoop to a heavy front door, also of oak. Now he understood why the house appeared in such good order: It seemed to have been constructed of quality oak from the ground up.
    The door had an old-fashioned iron knocker in the shape of a clenched fist; but even as Mike had reached out his own flesh-and-blood hand to the hinged hand, so the door had swung almost silently open, revealing The Chemist where he stood smiling his welcome.
    In that frozen moment of time Mike would have found it difficult to say what precisely he had expected; but it would never have been the bent figure at the threshold, or the warming glow of a fire behind him, reflected from a hearth deeper within the house. And after that moment had passed:
    “Come in, Mr. Milazzo,” the figure had stepped to one side, gesturing and inviting entry. “Please come in—and welcome to my house—my young visitor from Sicily! Come in man, and make yourself at home. For if you’re not comfortable then neither am I, and I insist on being at ease in my own home!”
    The Chemist’s voice—for all its robust-sounding message—had been no more than a whisper, fragile as last year’s wizened leaves. And as if to corroborate an impression of great age, he leaned on a walking-stick and shuffled as he led the way down a corridor to the main or living-room.
    As Mike had followed close behind his small, frail-seeming host, so the apprehension, the nervous tension he’d experienced throughout his journey dissipated. For The Chemist, who or whatever else he might be, was scarcely someone to be afraid of. Or so it seemed…but perhaps Mike should have remembered how he had felt much the same way about the Francezcis at one time…
    “A hearth-fire, on a warm summer night,” he’d observed, as he seated himself where his shrivelled host indicated, beside a small occasional table.
    Taking a chair directly opposite him, The Chemist answered, “I prefer the glow of a fire to electrical light. My eyes, much like yours, are not suited to bright lights, and especially the