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would soon be made clear, Harry was certain. They would be back, those … worshippers? Those acolytes, anyway. Back to witness the Great Return.’
    What? A Great Return?! The Necroscope grimaced and felt a strengthening of his resolve. Hah! The reanimation of an alien abomination, more like - the resurgence of an ancient evil. And that was why he was here: to prevent it! Moving more naturally now, but sweating still, and anxious, he commenced climbing the jumble of stone to the dais and sarcophagus -and was arrested by a mournful sound echoing in the confines of the great cave. Mournful, yes … a sobbing ululation … a howling! At which he felt the short hairs at the back of his neck stiffening in spontaneous recognition.
    Time was short and Harry forced himself to climb faster. The steps leaned this way and that, some of them almost as tall as himself, so that he must actually and physically climb them, and at each level adjust his stance and balance. But forty feet up the log jam of fallen blocks and toppled columns, finally he stood at the corner of the ominous mausoleum.
    Where the high dais backed up to the side of the cave the wall was formed of a series of black, near-vertical stacks compressed together into the almost crystalline forms of hexagonal columns. A horizontal fault had caused weak sections to topple, creating zig-zagging chimneys and, deeper still, cracks or windows passing right through the rock to the open air of the outside world. The rims of these vents or fissures were lined in pallid starlight, so that Harry imagined the entire cavern complex as located at Necroscope: The Lost Years - Vol. I
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    Brian Lumley
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    the edge of a crumbling ravine. Except… he more than merely imagined it, he knew—
    — That he was in fact in Scotland, somewhere in the high Grampians, the Cairngorms east ofKingussie!
    The knowledge came … and was gone again, as quickly as that. But the Necroscope’s urgency - those sensations of nameless anxiety -remained the same. And as a second bout of howling sounded, he gave a start, ran his tongue over dry lips and approached the great stone cofin. The heady smel of resin was much stronger here, curling up in the smoke from the torches at the base of the sarcophagus.
    It was then, for the first time, that Harry noticed the ‘decorations’ of two-inch diameter holes bored through the botom edges of the four slabs that made up the coffin’s sides. He saw them, and at once recognized their function: not merely as a crude decoration, but as outlets for the contents of the sarcophagus. There were six of them along the nine-foot-long coffin’s front edge, and three along each of its almost five-foot-long end panels. Warmed to a thick fluidity by the heat of the torches, a glutinous yelow substance was oozing from the rows of holes, dripping down the base of the sarcophagus, gradualy filling the cracks in the paving and forming gluey puddles on the floor of the dais. And this substance was the true source of the evocative ‘scent’ - warm resin, of course.
    The sarcophagus was almost five feet high; the Necroscope took up one of the central torches from its niche at the front of the great box, and leaned over to look inside. What with the gloom, the smoke, the heady reek and al, his eyes were watering badly; it was hard to make out the contents of the cofin. But the very terms he’d applied - ‘sarcophagus’, and ‘coffin’ -had in themselves been sufficient of a clue or forewarning. For what else would one expect to find in a tomb, but a corpse or corpses? Except, and as Harry Keogh was only too wel aware, there are corpses and corpses.
    The scatering of torches in the wals cast their flickering light down; the brand in Harry’s hand set the surface of the translucent, semi-solid resin in the cofin glowing like burnished bronze; the vague outline of… of something, but something grotesque almost beyond belief, suddenly became visible. Which was when what had