Gateway Essentials
14 total works
Harry Keogh is a necroscope - he knows the thoughts of corpses in their graves. Unfortunately for Harry, his talent works both ways. The outer limits of horror are unleashed when Harry Keogh is recruited by the E-Branch (E for ESP) of the British Secret Service to combat his own evil counterpart, the deadly Romanian Boris Dragosani.
Long buried in hallowed ground, bound by earth and silver, the master vampire schemes and plots. Trapped in unlife, neither dead nor living, Thibor Ferenczy hungers for freedom and revenge.
The vampire's human tool is Boris Dragosani, part of a super-secret Soviet spy agency. Dragosani is an avid pupil, eager to plumb the depthless evil of the vampire's mind. Ferenczy teaches Dragosani the awful skills of the necromancer, gives him the ability to rip secrets from the mind and bodies of the dead.
Dragosani works not for Ferenczy's freedom but is in the pay of an ultra-secret Soviet paranormal agency over which he means to gain power for himself with knowledge raped from the dead. His speciality is tearing secrets from the souls of newly dead traitors.
His only opponent: Harry Koegh. Like Dragosani, Harry is a necroscope who can speak with the dead. But Harry is a champion of the dead - and the living.
From the Romanian mausoleum where the undead vampire tests the limits of his bonds, the stage is set for the most horrifying, violent supernatural confrontation ever when Harry Keogh is recruited by the British Secret Service to take on Dragosani.
To protect Harry, the dead will do anything - even rise from their graves!
When vampires stalk among us . . .
Robbed of his supernatural powers, Harry Keogh is back from Starside, the vampire sourceworld. A mere man again - denied access to the metaphysical Moebius Continuum, no longer able to communicate with the dead - now he must rebuild his life in a world made safe only through his efforts. But safe for how long?
E-Branch, Britain's mindspy organisation, wants Harry back with his invaluable talents intact. Likewise the Great Majority, his countless dead friends across the world, who know that he's needed as never before. For the old thread has risen anew!
Crumbling in their graves, the teeming dead fear for Harry. If the ex-Necroscope can't find and destroy the last of the Ferenczys, that nightmare vampire dynasty, they know that the vampire will find him. He must regain his powers - or risk becoming a vampire himself, undead for ever . . .
An invasion from an alien dimension! That would be horror enough in itself: the thought of monstrous beings stalking the Earth. But how much more nightmarish if the invaders were each and every one . . . VAMPIRES!
Searching the infinite parallel time-streams of the metaphysical Mobius Continuum for his long-lost wife and son, the Necroscope Harry Keogh discovers that Soviet scientists have accidentally opened a portal to mankind's worst nightmares. The lethal terror of Chernobyl is a mere bad dream in comparison.
THE SOURCE of all Dark Legends can now be reached by any who dare pass through the Gate. And by some who do not dare - but who have no choice . . .
Jake's not sure he really wants to be a member of E-Branch, the supersecret ESP-powered organization that's dedicated to eradicating the vampire infestation of Earth. To the freewheeling, passionate Jake, the E-Branchers seem a little stuffy and hidebound--except for the lovely Liz, whom Jake wants to get to know better, body and mind. But Liz is a telepath, and if Jake's not careful, she'll find out about Korath. And that will likely be the end of Jake Cutter.
In Australia, Jake helped E-Branch destroy the aerie of the mind-master, Nephtam Malinari, one of a trio of Great Vampires who came to Earth from the vampire world. Malinari escaped and went to ground with the hideously beautiful Lady Vavara. Vavara has taken over a holy monastary on a beautiful Greek island and turned the nuns into most unholy creature with fearsome appetites for all things carnal.
Jake wants revenge against the Italian mobsters who killed the woman he loved and nearly killed him. As far as he's concerned, E-Branch can search for Malinari, Vavara, and the metamorphic Lord Szwart without him until he's satisfied his own bloodlust. But it seems vampire hunting is truly Jake's job now--the men he's trying to kill aren't men at all, but vampire spawn, hidden for two generations in human guise! To defeat them, Jake will need every weapon in a Necroscope's arsenal, including the power to all the unsleeping dead out of their moldering graves.
Two monstrous armies stand opposed: Vormulac Unsleep's undead legions out of Turgosheim, and Wratha the Risen's Renegades, masters of the last great aerie of the Wamphyri. The spoils of war will be revenge, territory, and human flesh! And blood, of course - the sweet blood of Sunside's Szgany. For the blood is the life, and when life or land are threatened there's only one course of action for a vampire: battle to the death!
Trapped in the middle: Nathan Keogh, Necroscope. And the espers of Earth's E-Branch, Trask and Zek, Goodly and Chung: Guardians of the Gate against a vampire invasion of Earth! The Necroscope holds the keys; he is the only one who can close the Gates to end the crimson carnage of the Bloodwars!
But the past holds many a secret, and the future was ever a devious thing!
Nathan is the new Necroscope!
But in the Vampire World the dead won't talk to him. And in the world of men beyond the Hell-lands Gate, there are even worse terrors than the vampires of Starside. Yet that is Nathan's lot: to venture into the world of his father, Earth, there to seek the source of Harry Keogh's awesome talents with which to return to Sunside/Starside, defeat the Wamphyri, and destroy -
THE LAST AERIE!
Nathan is not alone; Ben Trask and the espers of E-Branch will befriend him even as they befriended his father twenty years ago. But against natural and supernatural forces alike, will even their metaphysical skills suffice to send him home again? And if they do, what then? For in Starside a new vampire walks the night: Lord Nestor Lichloathe of the Wamphyri...
Nathan's brother!
High tide in a sea of blood!
...And for Harry Keogh, Necroscope, the tide has finally turned. Always the champion of the living and the dead alike, now Harry is shunned by all men. Always a hunter of the evil that stalks the night, now he in turn is hunted. Always the hero, now he is the plague-bearer, the menace - the monster!
But yet his greatest battle will be with himself, with the Thing Inside. For the Necroscope is now a vampire.
Forsaken by the teeming dead pursued by the espers of E-Branch, Harry has a choice: to be banished, hounded right out of this world...or to release the plague which he carries within himself upon all humanity!
The vampires have been vanquished! Harry Keogh and the armies of the dead have destroyed the evil that once plagued the world. Nathan and Nestor, secret twin sons of the Necroscope and a proud gypsy woman, were children when their father, his humanity poisoned by his fearsome struggles, sacrificed himself to save mankind.
Yet there are vampires still, vampires crueller and stranger than any the Necroscope had faced. When these new, merciless killers swoop out of the sky, Nathan and Nestor are men - but they have few of Harry Keogh's miraculous powers.
Torn from each other by battle, the sons of the Necroscope journey across the vampire world, exploring its mysteries, each seeking the powerful, terrible vampires, his missing brother...and the woman they both love!
Things in the ground, thinking their thoughts . . .
. . . Thoughts they can express only through Harry Keogh, NECROSCOPE. For that's Harry's talent, and his burden: he reads the thoughts of the dead in their graves - and the thoughts of the UNdead! Except . . . the undead are thinking thoughts that are totally-unthinkable!
Yulian Bodescue's mother fainted at the tomb of Thibor Ferenczy, vampire. Corrupt from birth, now Yulian feels a strange compulsion: to discover his real father and spread his works abroad. Only Harry Keogh, prisoner of the metaphysical Mobius Continuum, can stop him. Harry's other big problem is this:
HE DOESN'T HAVE A BODY!
VAMPIRES NEVER REST
And neither does Harry Keogh, the world's greatest vampire hunter, the Necroscope, the man who can talk to the dead. Right now, he's desperately searching for his wife and son, who disappeared in the midst of Harry's war against the undead monsters that plague mankind. Others will have to carry on that fight until the Necroscope has been reunited with his beloved family.
But it's not that easy to leave the vampire war behind. The bloodsuckers know that the Necroscope is their deadliest enemy and will do anything to destroy him.
Harry struggles to locate his missing family, not realising that he has become a pawn in the battle between two powerful vampires. When one has slain the other, the Necroscope will be the next to die!
Harry Keogh, the Necroscope, the man who can talk to the dead, the Earth's greatest vampire hunter, has been searching for his wife and infant son, gone missing during Harry's war against the vampires. This obsession has left him open to subtle influence by an ancient vampire, Radu. Entombed in amber, trapped in undeath, Radu plans for his resurrection and plots the destruction of other vampires who might challenge his supremacy.
Thus, Radu's enemies are now Harry's - and Harry cannot properly defend himself. His powers - his deadspeak and his ability to transport himself through the Mobius Continuum - are locked away in the recesses of his vampire-clouded mind.
But Harry is not without allies, living and dead. E-Branch, the psychic spy organisation, is worried about Harry. So is Harry's long-dead Ma, and the ancient philosopher and prophet Nostradamus, whose centuries-old quatrains make eerie sense in the modern world.
Right now, Harry Keogh doesn't even know he's the Necroscope. But Earth's teeming dead won't let him forget them for long - and won't let him forget that Radu and his vampire kind are humanity's deadliest enemies.