Necroscope 9: The Lost Years Read Online Free PDF Page B

wages for this!) ‘Our people at the Manse will see to your patient,’ Francesco finished. ‘We’ll be along later. Oh, and well done.’ Thanks, and out,’ the unseen pilot answered. There were no frills, not on the air …
    At Le Manse Madonie, the brothers looked on while their people saw to the girl from the helicopter. Still sedated, she’d been stripped and bathed by the time they got there. The rest of it would take most of the night. They watched for an hour or so - the enemas, the operation of the pumps and mechanically forced voiding, the ‘purification,’ as it were - but after that they lost interest. The manicuring of nails, the cleansing and polishing of teeth, application of fast-acting fungicides to her various openings (lotions to be removed later in a final bathing), al of that would go on and on. Clinical but less than beneficial: health wasn’t the object of the exercise. Only cleanliness.
    ‘And all wasted,’ Tony Francezci shook his head in disgust as they made for their apartments about midnight. They wouldn’t sleep but merely rest; time for sleeping when it was over.
    ‘Wasted?’ his brother answered. ‘Not at all. Well, the girl herself, maybe, but not the effort. He likes them clean, after all. And she can’t lie to him, can’t hide anything. Outside her mind, we could merely prise for clues. Inside it … he can lay everything bare down to the electrons of her brain and patterns of her past, the memories in the mush of her grey matter.’
    ‘Poetic!’ Francesco’s brother seemed appreciative, but his voice almost immediately turned sour. ‘Ah, but will he divulge what he discovers? Or will he obscure and obfuscate, as he’s so wont to do? He gets more difficult all the time.’
    Necroscope: The Lost Years - Vol. I
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    Brian Lumley
     
    ‘He’ll tell us something of it, at least,’ the other nodded. ‘It’s been a while and he’s hungry. He’ll be grateful, and she’ll make a rare tidbit. Why, I could even fancy her myself!’
    Tony gave a snort. ‘What? But you could fancy old Katerin, if that’s all there was!’ And as they parted company at the top of a flight of stairs and made for their own rooms: ‘Oh, and on that same note: did you have Julietta, in Julio’s backroom?’
    ‘Something like that,’ his brother leered back at him. ‘If you’re asking will we be sending for her … yes, we will. Why? Would you perhaps like her for yourself?’
    ‘Not really,’ Tony told him. ‘For you’ve been there before me.’ There was no malice in it, nor in Francesco’s answer:
    ‘It never stopped you before,’ he said, evenly …
    In the hour before dawn, the Francezcis met again in the secret heart of Le Manse Madonie. Beneath extensive cellars and ancient foundations, at a place deep in the bedrock - a place known only as ‘the pit’ - they came together to attend personally to the final stage of the operation: the lowering of the girl into an old, dried-out well.
    The mouth of the well was maybe fourteen feet across, wall to wall; the walls were three feet high, and of massive blocks of old hewn masonry; a ‘lid’ of electrified wire-mesh in a circular frame was hinged to the walls on opposite sides, covering the opening like a grille. But the pit was silent for now, sullen and sinister even to the Francescis. Down there somewhere, at a depth of some eighty feet, it opened into a cyst that had once contained water. Now it housed their father.
    A mechanical hoist stood to one side, its gantry reaching out over the pit. Suspended by chains, a metal table slowly rotated.
    The girl lay naked on the table, with her hands folded on her stomach. In her entire life she had only once been cleaner, less toxic: in the womb, in the days preceding her birth before the first human hands were lain on her. Now mhuman hands would be lain on her.
    But first the interrogation; not of the girl but the Old Ferenczy, the monstrously mutated Francezci in his pit. Only the