Necroscope V: Deadspawn

1 Charnel Knowledge

'Harry.' Darcy Clarke's voice was twitchy on the 'phone, but he was trying hard to control it. 'There's a problem we could use some help with. Your kind of help.'

Harry Keogh, Necroscope, might or might not know what was bothering the head of British E-Branch, and it might or might not have to do with him directly. 'What is it, Darcy?' he said, speaking softly.

'It's murder,' the other answered, and now his twitchi-ness came on strong, shaking his voice. 'It's bloody awful murder, Harry! My God, I never saw anything like it!'

Darcy Clarke had seen a lot in his time and Harry Keogh knew it, so that this was a statement he found hard to believe. Unless of course Clarke was talking about… 'My kind of help, you said?' Harry's attention was suddenly riveted to the 'phone. 'Darcy, are you trying to tell me — that — ?'

'What?' The other didn't understand him at first, but then he did. 'No, no — Christ, no — it's not the work of a vampire, Harry! But some kind of monster, certainly. Oh, human enough — but a monster, too.'

Harry relaxed a little, but a very little.

He'd been expecting a call from E-Branch sooner or later. This could be it: some sort of clever trap. Except… Darcy had always been his friend; Harry didn't think he would act on something — not even something like that — without checking it out every which way first. And even then Harry couldn't see Darcy coming after him with a crossbow and hardwood bolt, a machete, a can of petrol. No, he'd have to talk to him first, get Harry's side of it. But in the end…

… The head of the Branch knew almost as much about vampires as Harry did, now. And he'd know, too, that there was no hope. They'd been friends, fighting on the same side, so Harry guessed it wouldn't be Darcy's finger on the trigger. But someone's, certainly.

'Harry?' Clarke was anxious. 'Are you still there?'

'Where are you, Darcy?' Harry inquired.

The Military Police duties room, in the Castle,' the other answered at once. They found her body under the walls. Just a kid, Harry. Eighteen or nineteen. They don't even know who she is yet. That alone would be a big help. But to know who did it would be the biggest bonus of all.'

If there was one man Harry Keogh could trust, it had to be Darcy Clarke. 'Give me fifteen minutes,' he said, 'and I'll be there.'

Clarke sighed. Thanks, Harry. We'd appreciate it.'

'We?' Harry snapped. He couldn't keep the suspicion out of his voice.

'Eh?' Clarke sounded startled, taken aback. 'Why, the police. And me.'

Murder. The police. Not a Branch job at all. So what was Clarke doing on it — If it was real? 'How did you get roped in?'

And suddenly the other was… caught on the hop? Cagey, anyway. 'I… I was up here on a "duty run", visiting an old Scottish auntie. Something I do once in a blue moon. She's been on her last legs for ten years now but won't lie down, keeps on tottering around! I was scheduled to go back down to HQ today, but then this came up. It's something the Branch has been trying to help the police with, a set of — God! — gruesome serial murders, Harry.'

An old Scottish auntie? It was the first time Harry had heard of Darcy's old auntie. On the other hand, this had to be a good opportunity to find out if they knew anything about… about his problem. Harry knew he would have to be careful: he knew too much about E-Branch just to go walking right into something. Yes, and they knew too much about him. But maybe they didn't know everything. Not yet, anyway.

'Harry?' Clarke's voice came back again, tinny and a little distorted; probably the wires swaying in the winds that invariably blew around the Castle's high walls. 'Where will I see you?'

'On the esplanade, at the top of the Royal Mile,' the Necroscope growled. 'And Darcy…'

'Yes?'

'… Nothing. We'll talk later.' He replaced the telephone in its cradle and went back to his breakfast in the kitchen: an inch-thick steak, raw and bloody!

To look at, Darcy Clarke was possibly the world's most nondescript man. Nature had made up for this physical anonymity, however, by giving him an almost unique talent. Clarke was a deflector: he was the opposite of accident-prone. Only let him get close to danger and something, some parapsychological guardian angel, would intervene on his behalf. Which meant that if all of Clarke's similarly ESP-talented team of psychics were photographs, he'd be the only negative. He had no control over the thing; he was aware of it only on those occasions when he stared deliberately in the face of danger.

The talents of the others — telepathy, scrying, foretelling, oneiromancy, lie-detecting — were more pliable, obedient, applicable: but not Clarke's. It just did its own thing, which was to look after him. It had no other use. But because it ensured his longevity, it made him the right man for the job. The anomaly was this: that he himself didn't quite believe in it until he felt it working. He still switched off the current before he'd even change a light-bulb! But maybe that was just another example of the thing at work.

To look at him then, no one would suppose that Clarke could ever be the boss of anything, let alone head of the most secret branch of the British Secret Services. Middle-height, mousy-haired, with something of a slight stoop and a small paunch, and middle-aged to boot, he was middling in just about every way. He had sort of neutral-hazel eyes in a face not much given to laughter, and an intense mouth which you might remember if you remembered nothing else, but other than that there was a general facelessness about him which made him instantly forgettable. The rest of him, including the way he dressed, was… medium.

These were Harry Keogh's perfectly mundane thoughts in the few seconds which ticked by after he stepped out of the metaphysical Möbius Continuum on to the esplanade of Edinburgh Castle, and saw Darcy Clarke standing there with his back to him, hands thrust deep in the pockets of his overcoat, reading the legend on a brass plaque above a seventeenth-century drinking trough.

The iron fountain, depicting two heads, one ugly and the other beatific, stood:

… Near the site on which

many witches were burned at the

stake. The wicked head and serene

head signify that some used exceptional

knowledge for evil purposes, while others

were misunderstood and wished their

kind nothing but good.

The bright May day would be warm but for the gusting wind; the esplanade was almost empty; two dozen or so tourists stood in small groups at the higher end of the broad, walled, tarmac plateau, looking down across the walls at the city, or taking photographs of the great grey fortress — the Castle on the Rock — behind its facade of battlements and courtyards. Harry had arrived in the moment after Clarke, vainly scanning the esplanade for some sign of him, had turned to the plaque.

A moment ago Clarke had been alone with his thoughts and no living person within fifty feet of him. But now a soft voice behind him said: 'Fire is an indiscriminate destroyer. Good or evil, everything burns when it's hot enough.'

Clarke's heart jumped into his throat. He gave a massive start and whirled about, the colour rushing from his face and leaving him pale in a moment. 'Ha-Ha-Harry!' he gasped. 'God, I didn't see you! Where did you spring — ?' But here he paused, for of course he knew where Harry had sprung from… because the Necroscope had taken him there once, into that everywhere and — when place, that within and without, which was the Möbius Continuum.

Shaken, heart hammering, Clarke clutched at the wall for support. But it wasn't terror, just shock; his talent read no sinister purpose into Keogh's presence.

Harry smiled at him and nodded, touched his arm briefly, then looked at the plaque again. And his smile at once turned sour. 'Mainly they were exorcizing their own fears,' he said. 'For of course most if not all of these women were innocent. Indeed, we should all be so innocent.'

'Eh?' Clarke hadn't quite recovered his balance yet, wasn't focusing on Keogh's meaning. 'Innocent?' He too looked at the plaque.

'Completely,' Harry nodded again. 'Oh, they may have been talented in their way, but they were hardly evil.

Witchcraft? Why, today you'd probably try to recruit them into E-Branch!'

Suddenly, truth flooded in on Clarke and he knew he wasn't dreaming; no need to pinch himself and start awake; it was just this effect which Harry always had on him. Three weeks ago in the Greek islands (was that all it had been, three weeks?) it had been the same. Except at that time Harry had been near-impotent: he hadn't had his deadspeak. Then he'd got it back, and set out on his double mission: to destroy the vampire Janos Ferenczy and regain his mastery of -

Clarke snatched a breath. 'You got it back!' He grabbed Harry's arm. The Möbius Continuum!'

'You didn't get in touch with me,' Harry accused, albeit quietly, 'or you'd have known.'

'I got your letter,' Clarke quickly defended himself, 'and I tried a dozen times to get you on the 'phone. But if you were home you weren't answering. Our locators couldn't find you…' He threw up his hands. 'Give me a chance, Harry! I've only been back from the Med a few days, and a pile of stuff to catch up with back here, too! But we'd finished the job in the islands, and we supposed you'd done the same at your end. Our espers were on it, of course; reports were coming in; Janos's place above Halmagiu, blown off the mountain like that. It could only be you. We knew you'd somehow won. But the Möbius Continuum too? Why, that's… wonderful! I'm delighted for you!'

Harry wondered: Oh, really? But out loud he only said: 'Thanks.'

'How in hell did you do that?' Clarke was still excited. If it was all a sham he was good at it. 'I mean, wreck the castle that way? If we've got it right it was devastating! Is that how Janos died, in the explosion?'

'Slow down,' Harry told him, taking his arm. 'We can talk while you take me to see this girl.'

The other's excitement quickly ebbed. 'Yes,' he nodded, his tone subdued now, 'and that's something else, too. You won't like it, Harry.'

'So what's new?' The Necroscope seemed as calm (resigned, soulful, sardonic?) as ever. And though he tried not to show it, Clarke suspected he was wary, too. 'Did you ever show me anything I did like?'

But Clarke had an answer to that one. 'If everything was the way we'd like it, Harry,' he said, 'then we'd all be out of work. Me, I'd gladly retire tomorrow. I keep threatening to. But when I see something like… like I'm going to show you, then I know that someone has to do it.'

As they started up the esplanade, Harry said: 'Now this is a castle!' His voice was more animated now. 'But as for the Castle Ferenczy: that was a heap long before I got started on it. You asked how I did it?'

He sighed, then continued: 'A long time ago, toward the end of the Bodescu affair, I learned about an ammo and explosives dump in Kolomyya and used stuff from there to blow up the Chateau Bronnitsy. Well, since the easy way is often the best way, I did it again. I made two or three trips, Möbius trips, and put enough plastic explosive into the foundations of Janos's place to blow it to hell! I'm not even going to guess what was in the guts of that place, but I'm sure there was — stuff- there which even I didn't see and still don't want to. You know, Darcy, even a finger-end of Semtex will blow bricks right out of a wall? So you can imagine what a couple of hundredweight will do. If there was anything there that we might call "alive",' he shrugged and shook his head, 'it wasn't when I'd finished.'

While Harry talked, the head of E-Branch studied him. But not so intently that he would notice. He seemed exactly the same man Clarke had come to Edinburgh to see just a month ago, a visit which had ended for Clarke in Rhodes and the islands of the Dodecanese, and for Harry in the mountains of Transylvania. He seemed the same, but was he? For the fact was, Darcy Clarke knew someone who said he wasn't.

Harry Keogh was a composite. He was two men: the mind of one and the body of another. The mind was Keogh and the body was… it had once been Alec Kyle. And Clarke had known Kyle, too, in his time. The strangest thing was this: that as time progressed, so the Kyle face and form got to look more like the old Harry, whose body was dead. But that was something which always made Clarke's brain spin. He skipped it, put the metaphysical right out of his mind and studied the purely physical.

The Necroscope was perhaps forty-three or forty-four but looked five years younger. But of course that was only the body; the mind was five years younger again. Even thinking about someone like Harry Keogh was a weird business. And again Clarke forced himself to concentrate on the physical.

Harry's eyes were honey-brown, occasionally defensive and frequently puppy-soulful — or would be if one could see under those wedge-sided sunglasses he was wearing in the shade of his broad-brimmed 1930s hat. If there was one thing in all the world Clarke hated to see, it had to be Harry wearing those dark-lensed glasses and that hat. Anyone else, no problem. But not Harry, and not now. Especially the sunglasses. They were something Clarke had told himself to look out for; for while it was a common enough thing to wear such in the Greek islands in late April or early May, it was quite another to see them in Edinburgh at that time of year. Unless someone had weak eyes. Or different eyes…

Grey streaks, so evenly spaced as to seem deliberately designed or affected, were plentiful in Harry's russet-brown, naturally wavy hair. In a few years the grey could easily take over; even now it lent him a certain erudition, gave him the look of a scholar. A scholar, yes, but in what fabulous subjects? But in fact Keogh hadn't been like that at all. Hadn't used to be. What, Harry, a black magician? A warlock? Lord, no!

… Just a Necroscope: a man who talked to dead people.

Keogh's body had been well-fleshed, maybe even a little overweight, once. With his height, however, that ought not to have mattered a great deal. But it had mattered to Harry. After that business at the Chateau Bronnitsy — his metempsychosis — he'd trained his new body down, brought it to a peak of perfection. Or at least done what he could with it, considering its age. That's why it looked only thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old.

And inside Harry's body and behind his face, an innocent. Or someone who had used to be innocent. He hadn't asked to be the way he was, hadn't wanted to become E-Branch's most powerful weapon and do the things he'd done. But he'd been what he was and the rest had come as a matter of course. And now? Was he still an innocent? Did he still have the soul of a child? Did he have any soul at all? Or did something else have him?

Now the pair had passed under the archway of the military guardroom, where several police officers had been interviewing a group of uniformed soldiers, into the cobbled gantlet which was the approach alley to the Castle proper. All of the officers in the guardroom seemed aware that Clarke was 'something big'; Harry and he weren't challenged; suddenly the bulk of the Castle loomed before them.

And now Darcy said: 'So I don't need to do any tidying up? You left nothing undone, right?'

'Nothing,' Harry told him. 'What about Janos's set-up in the islands?'

'Gone!' said the other with finality. 'All of it. All of them. But I still have a few men out there — just looking — just to be on the safe side.'

Harry's face was pale and grim but he forced a strange, sad smile. 'That's right, Darcy,' he said. 'Always be on the safe side. Never take chances. Not with things like that.'

There was something in his voice; Clarke looked at the Necroscope out of the corner of his eye, carefully, unobtrusively examining him yet again as they entered the shade of a broad courtyard, with gaunt buildings rising on three sides. 'Are you going to tell me how it was?'

'No.' Harry shook his head. 'Later, maybe. And maybe not.' He turned and looked Clarke straight in the eye. 'One vampire's pretty much like another. Hell, what can I tell you about them that you don't already know? You know how to kill them, that's a fact…'

Clarke stared directly into the black, enigmatic lenses of the other's glasses. 'You're the one who showed us how, Harry,' he said.

Harry smiled his sad smile again, and apparently casually — but Clarke suspected very deliberately — reached up a hand and took off his glasses. Not for a moment turning his face away, he folded the glasses and put them into his pocket. And: 'Well?' he said.

Clarke's jaw fell open as he backed off a stumbling pace, barely managing to contain the sigh — of relief — which he felt welling inside. Caught off balance (again), he looked into the other's perfectly normal, unwavering brown eyes and said: 'Eh? What? Well?'

'Well, where are we going?' Harry answered, with a shrug. 'Or are we already there?'

Clarke gathered his wits. 'We're there,' he said. 'Almost.'

He led the way down stone steps and under an arch, then through a heavy door into a stone-flagged corridor. As they emerged into the corridor, a Military Policeman came erect and saluted. Clarke didn't correct his error, merely nodded, led Harry past him. Halfway along the corridor a middle-aged man — unmistakably a policeman for all that he wore civilian clothing — guarded an iron-banded door of oak.

Again Clarke's nod, and the plain-clothes man swung the door open for him and stepped aside.

'Now we're there,' Harry pre-empted Clarke, causing him to close his mouth on those selfsame words, unspoken. Harry Keogh needed no one to tell him there was a dead person close by. And with one more glance at the Necroscope, Clarke ushered him inside. The officer didn't follow them but closed the door quietly behind them.

The room was cool: two walls were of natural stone; a rocky outcrop of volcanic gneiss grew out of the stone-flagged floor in one corner and into the walls there. This place had been built straight on to the rock. A storeroom, steel shelving was stacked on one side. On the other, beside the cold stone wall: a surgical trolley with a body on it, and a white rubber sheet covering the body.

The Necroscope wasted no time. The dead held no terrors for Harry Keogh. If he had as many friends among the living, then he'd be the most loved man in the world. He was the most loved man, but the ones who loved him couldn't tell anyone about it. Except Harry himself.

He went to the trolley, drew back the rubber sheet from the face, closed his eyes and rocked back on his heels. She had been sweet and young and innocent — yes, another innocent — and she had been tormented. And she still was. Her eyes were closed now, but Harry knew that if they were open he'd read terror in them. He could feel those dead eyes burning through the pale lids that covered them, crying out to him in their horror.

She would need comforting. The teeming dead — the Great Majority — would have tried, but they didn't always get it right. Their voices were often mournful, ghostly, frightening, to anyone who didn't know them. In the darkness of death they could seem like night visitants, nightmares, like wailing banshees come to steal a soul. She might think she was dreaming, might even suspect that she was dying, but not that she was already dead. That took time to sink in, and the freshly dead were usually the last to know. That was because they were the least able to accept it. Especially the very young, whose young minds had not yet properly considered it.

But on the other hand, if she had actually seen death coming — if she had read it in the eyes of her destroyer, felt the numbing blow, or the hands on her throat, closing off the air, or the cutting edge of the instrument of her destruction, slicing into her flesh — then she would know. And she'd be cold and afraid and tearful. Tearful, yes, for no one knew better than Harry how the dead could cry.

He hesitated, wasn't sure how best to approach her, not even sure if he should approach her, not now. For Harry knew that she'd been pure, and that he was impure. True, her flesh was heading for corruption even now, but there's corruption and there's corruption…

Angrily, he thrust the thought aside. No, he wasn't a defiler. Not yet. He was a friend. He was the only friend. He was the Necroscope.

Be that as it may, when he put his hand on her clay-cold brow she recoiled as from a serpent! Not physically, for she was dead, but her mind cringed, shrank down, withdrew into itself like the feathery fronds of some strange sea anemone brushed by a swimmer. Harry felt his blood turn to ice and for a moment stood in horror of himself. The last thing he'd wanted was to frighten her still more.

He wrapped her in his thoughts, in what had once been the warmth of his deadspeak: It's all right! Don't be afraid! I won't hurt you! No one can ever hurt you again! It was as easy as that. Without even trying, he'd told her that she was dead.

But in the next moment he knew that she had already known: KEEP OFF! Her deadspeak was a sobbing shriek of torment in Harry's mind. GET AWAY FROM ME, YOU FILTHY… THING!

As if someone had touched him with naked electric wires, Harry jerked where he stood beside her, jerked and shuddered as he relived, with her, the girl's last moments. Her last living, breathing moments, but not the last things she had known. For in certain mercifully rare circumstances — and at the command of certain monstrous men — even dead flesh can be made to feel again.

In a nightmarishly subliminal sequence, a series of flickering, kaleidoscopic, vividly ghastly pictures flashed on the screen of the Necroscope's metaphysical mind and then were gone. But after-images remained, and Harry knew that these wouldn't go away so easily; indeed, that they would probably remain for a long time. He knew it as surely as he now knew what he was dealing with, because he'd dealt with such a thing before.

That one's name had been… Dragosani!

This one, this poor girl's murderer, had been like that — like Dragosani, a necromancer — but in one especially hideous respect he'd been still worse than that. For not even Dragosani had raped his corpse victims!

But it's over now, he told the girl. He can't come back. You're safe now.

He felt the shuddering of her thoughts receding, replaced by the natural curiosity of her incorporeal mind. She wanted to know him, but for the moment felt afraid to know anything. She wanted, too, to know her condition, except that was probably the most frightening thing of all. But in her own small way she was brave, and she had to know for sure.

Am I… (her deadspeak voice was no longer a shriek but a shivery tremor) am I really…?

Yes, you are, Harry nodded, and knew that she'd sense the movement even as all the teeming dead sensed his every mood and motion. But… (he stumbled), I mean… it could be worse!

He'd been through all of this before, too often, and it never got any easier. How do you convince someone recently dead that it could be worse? 'Your body will rot and worms will devour it, but your mind will go on. Oh, you won't see anything — it will always be dark, and you'll never touch or taste or smell anything again — but it could be worse. Your parents and loved ones will cry over your grave and plant flowers there, seeking to visualize in their blooms something of your face and form; but you won't know they're there or be able to speak to them and say, "Here I am!" You won't be able to reassure them that "It could be worse."'

This was Harry's expression of grief, meant to be private, but his thoughts were deadspeak. She heard and felt them and knew him for a friend. And: You're the Necroscope, she said then. They tried to tell me about you but I was afraid and wouldn't listen. When they spoke to me I turned away. I didn't want to… to talk to dead people.

Harry was crying. Great tears blurred his vision, rolled down his pale, slightly hollow cheeks, splashed hot where they fell on his hand on her brow. He hadn't wanted to cry, didn't know he could, but there was that in him which worked on his feelings and amplified them, lifting them above the emotions of ordinary men. Safe — so long as it worked on an emotion such as this one, which was grief and entirely human.

Darcy Clarke had come forward; he touched the Necroscope's arm. 'Harry?'

Harry shook him off, and his voice was choked but harsh too as he rasped: 'Leave us alone! I want to talk to her in private.'

Clarke backed off, his Adam's apple bobbing. It was the look on Harry's face, which brought tears to his eyes, too. 'Of course,' he said. He turned and left the room, and closed the door after him.

Harry took a metal-framed chair from beside the stacked shelving and sat by the dead girl. He very carefully cradled her head in his arms.

I… I can feel that, she said, wonderingly.

'Then you can feel, too, that I'm not like him,' Harry answered out loud. He preferred simply to talk to the dead, for that way it came more naturally to him.

Most of her terror had fled now. The Necroscope was a comfort; he was warm, a safe haven. It might even be her father stroking her face. Except she wouldn't be able to feel him. Only Harry Keogh could touch the dead. Only Harry, and -

Her terror welled up again — but he was quick to sense it and fend it off: 'It's over and you're safe. We won't — I won't — let anything hurt you again, ever.' It was more than just a promise, it was his vow.

In a little while her thoughts grew calm and she was easy, or easier, again. But she was very bitter, too, when she said: I'm dead, but he — that thing — is alive!

'It's one of the reasons I'm here,' Harry told her. 'For you weren't the only one. There were others before you, and unless we stop him there'll be others after you. So you see, it's very important that we get him, for he's not just a murderer but also a necromancer; which makes him more, far worse, than the sum of his parts. A murderer destroys the living, and a necromancer torments the dead. But this one enjoys the terror of his victim both before and after they die!'

I can't talk about what he did to me, she said, shuddering.

'You don't have to,' Harry shook his head. 'Right now I'm only interested in you. I'm sure there'll be people worrying about you. Until we know who you are, we won't be able to put their minds at rest.'

Do you think their minds will ever be at rest, Harry?

It was a good question. 'We don't have to tell them everything,' he answered. 'I might be able to fix it so that they only know, well, that someone killed you. They don't have to be told how.'

Can you do that?

'If that's the way you want it,' he nodded.

Then do it! She offered a breathless sigh. That was the worst, Harry: thinking about them, my folks, how they'd take it. But if you can make it easier for them… I think I'm beginning to understand why the dead love you so. My name is Penny. Penny Sanderson. And I live — lived — at…

… And so it went. She told the Necroscope all about herself, and he remembered every smallest detail. That was what Darcy Clarke had wanted, but it wasn't everything he'd wanted. When finally Penny Sanderson was through, Harry knew he still had to take her that one step further.

'Penny, listen,' he said. 'Now I don't want you to do or say anything. Don't try to talk to me at all. But like I said before, this is important.'

About him?

'Penny, when I first touched you, and you thought it was him come back for more, you remembered how it had been. Parts of it, anyway. You thought about it in brief flashes of memory. That was deadspeak and I picked it up. But it was all very chaotic, kaleidoscopic.'

But that's all there is, she said. That's how it was.

Harry nodded. 'OK, that's fine, but I need to see it again. See, the better I remember it, the more chance I have of finding him. So really you don't have to tell me anything, not as a conscious act. I just want to shoot a few words at you, at which you'll picture the bits I need. Do you understand?'

Word association?

'Something like that, yes. Except of course that in this case the association will be hell for you — but easier than just talking about it.'

She understood; Harry sensed her willingness. Before she could change her mind, he said: 'Knife!'

A picture hit the screen of his mind like a mixture of blood and acid! The blood incensed him and the acid burned, etching the picture there for good this time. Harry reeled before her horror — which was unbearable — and if he hadn't been seated would have fallen. The shock was that physical, even though it lasted only a fraction of a second.

When she stopped sobbing he said, 'Are you OK?'

No… yes.

'Face!' Harry fired at her.

Face?

'His face?' He tried again.

And a face, red, leering, bloated with lust, with an open, salivating mouth and eyes insensate as frozen diamonds, went skittering across the Necroscope's mind's eye. But not so fast that he didn't catch it. And this time she wasn't sobbing. She wanted this to work. Wanted him brought to justice.

'Where?'

A picture of… a car park? A motorway restaurant? Darkness pierced with points of light. A string of cars and lorries, speeding down three lanes, with oncoming lights whose glare momentarily blinded. And windscreen wipers swinging left — right — left — right — left…

But there was no pain in the last and Harry guessed that wasn't where it had happened. No, it had been where it started to happen, probably where she met him.

'He picked you up in a car?'

A rain-blurred picture of an ice-blue screen with white letters superimposed or printed there: FRID or FRIG? The screen had many wheels and puffed exhaust smoke. It was the way she remembered it. A large vehicle? A lorry? Articulated?

'Penny,' Harry said, 'I have to do this — only this time I don't mean where you met him: 'Where!?'

Ice! Bitter cold! Dark! The whole place softly vibrating or throbbing! And dead things everywhere, hanging from hooks! Harry tried to fix it all in his mind but nothing was clear, only her shock and disbelief that this was happening to her.

She was sobbing again, terrified, and Harry knew that he'd soon have to stop; he couldn't bring himself to hurt her any more. But at the same time he knew he mustn't weaken now.

'Death!' he snapped, hating himself.

And it was the knife scene all over again, and Harry knew he was losing her, could feel her withdrawing. Before that could happen: 'And… afterwards?' (God! — he didn't want to know! He didn't want to know!)

Penny Sanderson screamed, and screamed, and screamed!

But the Necroscope got his picture.

And wished he hadn't bothered…

2 Upon Their Backs, to Bite 'em…

Harry stayed with her for a further half-hour: calming, soothing, doing what he could, and in so doing managing to get a few more personal details out of her, enough to give the police something to go on, anyway. But when it was time to go she wouldn't let him without his promise that he'd see her again. She hadn't been there long, but already Penny had discovered that death was a lonely place.

The Necroscope was jaded — or thought he was — by life, death, everything. He believed he needed motivation. Before leaving her he asked if she'd mind if he looked at her. She told him that if it were anyone else she couldn't care less, because she wouldn't even know they were looking, not any longer. But with Harry she would know, because he was the Necroscope. She was just a shy kid.

'Hey!' he protested, but gently, 'I'm no voyeur!'

It wasn't… if he hadn't… if I was unmarked, then I don't think I'd mind, she said.

'Penny, you're lovely,' Harry told her. 'And me? After all's said and done, I'm only human. But believe me I'm not putting you down when I tell you that right now I'm not interested in that side of things. It's because you're marked that I want to see you. I need to feel angry. And now that I know you, I know that to see what he did would make me feel angry.'

Then I'll just have to pretend you're my doctor, she said.

Harry very gently took the rubber sheet off her pale, young body, looked at her, and tremblingly put the sheet back again.

Is it bad? She fought down a sob. It's such a shame. Mum always said I could be a model.

'So you could,' he told her. 'You were very beautiful.'

But not now? And though she kept from actually sobbing, he could feel her despair brimming over. But in a little while she said: Harry? Did it make you angry?

He felt a growl rising in his throat, suppressed it, and before he left her said, 'Oh yes. Yes, it did.'

Darcy Clarke was still outside the door with the plain-clothes man. Looking washed out, Harry joined them and closed the door after him. 'I've left the sheet off her face,' he said. And then, speaking specifically to — and glaring at — the officer: 'Don't cover her face!'

The other raised an indifferent eyebrow and shrugged. 'Who, me?' he said, his accent nasal, Glaswegian, less than sympathetic. 'Ah had nothing tae do wi' it, Chief. It's just that when they're dead 'uns, people usually cover them up!'

Harry turned swiftly towards him, eyes widening and nostrils flaring in his pale, grimacing face, and Darcy Clarke's instinct took over. The Necroscope was suddenly dangerous and Clarke's weird talent knew it. There was a terrible anger in him, which he needed to take out on someone. But Clarke knew that it wasn't directed at him, wasn't directed at anyone but simply required an outlet.

Quickly forcing himself between Harry and the special-duty officer, he grabbed the Necroscope's arms. 'It's OK, Harry,' he said, urgently. 'It's OK. It's just that these people see things like this all the time. It doesn't affect them so much. They get used to it.'

Harry got a grip of himself, but not without an effort of will. He looked at Clarke and growled, They don't see things like that all the time! No one's ever going to "get used" to the idea that someone — something — could do that to a girl!' And then, seeing Clarke's bewildered expression: 'I'll explain later.'

He turned his gaze across Clarke's shoulder, and in a tone more nearly civil now — more civilized? — asked the officer, 'Do you have a notebook?'

Mystified — not knowing what was going on, just trying to do his job — the other said, 'Aye,' and groped in his pocket. He scribbled quickly as Harry fired Penny's name, address and family details at him. Following which, and looking even more mystified: 'You're sure about these details, sir?'

Harry nodded. 'Just be sure to pass on what I said, right? I don't want anyone to cover her face over. Penny always hated having her face covered.'

'You knew the young lady, then?'

'No,' said Harry. 'But I know her now.'

They left the officer muttering into his walkie-talkie and scratching his head, and went up into the courtyard and the fresh air. As they moved into sunlight Harry put on his dark glasses and turned up the collar of his coat. And Clarke said to him: 'You got something else, right?'

Harry nodded, but in the next moment: 'Never mind what I got — what have you got? Do you have any idea what you're dealing with?'

Clarke threw up his hands. 'Only that he's a serial killer, and that he's weird.'

'But you know what he does?'

Clarke nodded. 'Yes. We know it's sexual. A sort of sex, anyway. A sick sort of sex.'

'Sicker than you think.' Harry shivered. 'Dragosani's kind of sickness.'

That pulled Clarke up short. 'What?'

'A necromancer,' Harry told him. 'A murderer, and a necromancer. And in a way worse than Dragosani, because this one's a necrophiliac, too!'

Clarke somehow succeeded in grimacing and looking blank at the same time. Then: 'Refresh my mind,' he said. 'I know I should be getting something, but I'm not.'

Harry thought about it for a few moments before answering, but in the end there was no way to tell it other than the way it was. 'Dragosani tore open the bodies of dead men for information,' he finally said. 'That was his "talent", just like you have yours and I have mine. Necromancy. It was his job when he worked for Gregor Borowitz and Soviet E-Branch at the Chateau Bronnitsy: to "examine" the corpses of his country's enemies. He could read their passions in the mucus of their eyes, tear the truths of their lives right out of their steaming tripes, tune in on the whispering of their stiffening brains and sniff their smallest secrets in the gases of their swollen guts!'

Clarke held up a hand in protest. 'Christ, Harry — I know all that!'

The Necroscope nodded. 'But you don't know what it's like to be dead, and that's why you're not getting it. It's because you can't imagine what I'm talking about. You know what I do and accept it because you know it for a fact, but deep inside yourself you still think it's just too way out to think about. So you don't. And I don't blame you. Now listen.

'I know I always protested I was different from Dragosani, but in certain ways he and I were alike. Even now I don't like admitting it, but it's true. I mean, you know what the bastard did to Keenan Gormley — the mess he made of him — but only I know what Gormley thought about it!'

And now Clarke got it. He snatched air in a great gasp and felt the short hairs stiffen at the back of his neck as an irrepressible shudder wracked his body. And: 'Jesus, you're right!' he breathed. 'I just don't think about it — because I don't want to think about it! But in fact Keenan knew! He felt everything Dragosani did to him!'

'Right,' Harry was relentless. 'Torture is the necromancer's principal tool. The dead feel the necromancer working on them just like they hear me talking to them. Except unlike the living, there's nothing they can do about it, not even scream. Not and be heard, anyway. And Penny Sanderson?'

Clarke went pale in a moment. 'She could feel — ?'

'Everything,' Harry growled. 'And that bastard, whoever he is, knew it! So you see while rape is one thing, and bad enough when it's done to the living, and while necrophilia is something else, an outrage carried out upon the unfeeling dead, what he does hits new lows. He tortures his victims alive, then tortures them dead — and he knows while he's doing it that they can feel it! He uses a knife with a curved blade, like a tool for scooping earth when you're planting bulbs. It's razor-sharp and… and he doesn't use it for scooping earth.'

It had been Clarke's intention to stop at the guardroom and speak to the policemen there. But now, pale as a ghost, he reeled to the castle's low wall. Clutching its masonry for support, he gulped at the gusting air and fought down the bile he felt rising from the churning of his guts.

And: 'Jesus, Jesus!' he choked. For he could see it all now and there was nothing he could do to cleanse the picture from his mind's eye. Weird sex? God, what an understatement!

Harry had followed Clarke to the wall. The head of E-Branch looked at him sideways from a watery eye. 'He… he digs holes in those poor kids, then makes love to the holes!'

'Love?' the Necroscope hissed. 'His flesh ruts in blood like a pig's snout ruts in soil, Darcy! Except the soil can't feel! Didn't the police tell you where he leaves his semen?'

Clarke's eyes were swimming and his brow feverish, but he felt his nausea being replaced by a cold loathing almost as strong as the Necroscope's own. No, the police hadn't told him that, but now he knew. He looked out over the blurred city and asked: 'How do you know he knows they feel it?'

'Because he talks to them while he's doing it,' Harry told him, mercilessly. 'And when they cry out in their agony and beg him to stop, he hears them. And he laughs!'

Clarke thought: Christ, I shouldn't have asked! And you — you bastard, Harry Keogh — you shouldn't have told me!

With fury in his eyes, he turned to face the Necroscope… and faced thin air. A wind blew up the esplanade and tourists leaned into it, balancing themselves. Overhead, seagulls cried where they spiralled on a rising thermal.

But Harry was no longer there…

Later, with Clarke's help, Harry fixed it that Penny Sanderson would be cremated. Her parents wanted it, and it wouldn't hurt them that it was all a show. They wouldn't know it anyway: that Penny was already ashes when their tears fell on her empty box, before it slid away from them behind swishing curtains and became wood smoke.

Clarke hadn't wanted to do it but he owed Harry. For a good many things. And he wanted very badly to catch the maniac who had done this thing to Penny and too many other innocents. Harry had told him: 'If I have her ashes — her pure ashes, not damaged or spoiled by burned linen or charcoal — then I'll be able to talk to her any time I want to. And maybe she'll remember something important.' It had seemed logical at the time (if anything about the Necroscope could ever seem logical) and so Clarke had pulled strings. As the head of E-Branch he had that sort of power. But if he'd known the whole story of what had happened at the castle of Janos Ferenczy, in Transylvania, maybe he would have thought twice about it. And then not done it at all.

He certainly wouldn't have gone along with it if Zek Föener had stood firm on her first… accusation? Or if not an accusation, a premonition at least.

Zek was a telepath and as loyal to the Necroscope as they came. In the Greek islands at the end of the Ferenczy business, she'd had occasion to try and contact Harry with her mind, during the course of which something had shocked her rigid. But it had been a while before she could tell Clarke what it was. They had been on the island of Rhodes at the time, less than a month ago, and their conversation was still fresh in his mind.

'What is it, Zek?' he'd said to her, when he could talk to her in private. 'I saw that change come over your face when you contacted Harry. Is he in some sort of trouble?'

'No — yes — I don't know!' she'd answered, fear and frustration audible in her every word, visible in her every move. Then she'd looked at him and it was that same, strange, disbelieving look he'd seen when she tried to contact Harry: as if she gazed on alien things, in a distant world beyond the times and places we know. And he remembered that indeed she had once been in just such a world, with Harry Keogh. A world of vampires!

'Zek,' he'd said then, 'if there's something I should know about Harry, it's only fair that — '

' — Only fair to who?' She had cut him off. To whom? To… what? And is it fair to him?'

At which Clarke had felt an icy chill in his blood. And: 'I think you'd better explain,' he'd said.

'I can't explain!' she'd snapped at him. 'Or maybe I can.' And then the empty expression in her beautiful eyes had filled itself in a little, and her tone had become more reasonable, even pleading. 'It's just that every other mind I've touched in the last few days has seemed to be one of them! So maybe I've started to find them where… where there aren't any? Where they can't possibly be?'

And then he'd known for certain what she was trying to tell him. 'You mean that when you contacted Harry, you sensed — ?'

'Yes — yes!' she'd snapped again. 'But I could be mistaken. I mean, isn't that what he's doing at this very moment, going up against them? He's close to vampires right now, even as we talk. It could be one of them I sensed. God, it has to be one of them…'

End of conversation, but it hadn't been out of Clarke's mind from that day to this. When it was time to leave the islands and come home again, he had asked Zek if she'd like to visit England, as a guest of E-Branch.

Her answer had been more or less what he expected: 'You're not fooling anyone, Darcy. And anyway I don't like the idea that you would want to fool me, not after all of this. So I'll tell you straight out: I detest the E-Branches, whether they're Russian, British, whoever they belong to! No, not the espers themselves but the way they're used, the fact that they need to be used at all. As for Harry: I won't go against the Necroscope.' And she'd given her head a very definite shake. 'We were on different sides once before, Harry and me, and he gave me some good advice. "Never again go up against me or mine," he said, and I never will. I've seen inside his mind, Darcy, and I know that when someone like Harry says something like that to you, you'd better listen to him. So if there are… problems, well, they're your problems, not mine.'

It had been the kind of answer to make him worry all the more.

Back in London after the Greek expedition, at E-Branch HQ, a mass of work had built up. During the first few days back at his desk Clarke had cleared or at least begun to clear quite a lot of it, and had also managed to clear his mind of much of the horror of the Ferenczy job. But nightmares kept him awake most nights. One in particular was very bad and very persistent.

This was the essence of it: they (Clarke, Zek, Jazz Simmons, Ben Trask, Manolis Papastamos: most of the Greek team, with the important exception of Harry Keogh) were in a boat that lolled gently on an absolutely flat ocean. It was so blue, that sea, that it could only be the Aegean. A small, stark, sloping island of rock floating on the blue made a gold-rimmed, black silhouette against the blinding refraction of a half-sun where it prepared to dip down beyond the slanting rock of the island into a shortlived twilight. The serenity of the scene was immaculately structured, vivid, real, with nothing in it to hint that it was prelude to nightmare. But since the thing was recurrent — indeed a nightly event — Clarke always knew what was coming and where to look for the start of it.

He would look at Zek, gorgeous in a swimsuit that left little to the imagination, stretched out along a narrow sunbathing platform attached to the upper strakes at the stern. She lay on her stomach, her face turned sideways, with one hand dangling in the water. And the sea so calm that her fingers made ripples. But then…

She glanced sharply at her hand in the water, snatched it out and stared at it, gave a cry of disgust and tumbled herself inboard! Her hand was red, bleeding! No, not bleeding, but bloody — as if it had been dipped in someone else's blood! By which time the entire crew had seen that the sea itself was sullied by a great crimson swath, an elongated splotch like an oilslick (a bloodslick?) which had drifted to surround the boat with its thick, red ribbons.

But drifted from where?

They looked out across the sea, followed the swath to its source. Previously unnoticed, the warty, barnacled prow of a sunken vessel stuck up in grotesque salute from the water only fifty yards away. Its figurehead was a hideous but recognizable face, mouth gaping, hugely disproportionate fangs jutting, and blood spewing in an unending torrent from the silently shrieking mouth!

And the vessel's name, as she gurgled down out of sight into her own blood? Clarke didn't need to read all of those black letters daubed on her scabby hull as they disappeared, in reverse order, one by one into the crimson ocean: O… R… C… E… N.

No, for he already knew that this was the plagueship Necroscope, out of Edinburgh, contaminated in strange ports of call and doomed for ever to oceans of gore! Or until, like now, she sank.

Aghast, he watched her go down, then jumped to his feet as Papastamos cursed and leaped to snatch up a speargun. The swath of blood beside the boat was bubbling, fuming, as some nameless thing drifted to the surface. A body, naked, face-down, floated up and lolled like some weird jellyfish, dangling its tentacle arms and legs. And feeble as a jellyfish, it tried to swim!

Then Papastamos was at the side of the boat, aiming his gun, and Clarke was starting forward, screaming, 'No!'… but too late! The steel spear hissed through the air and thwacked into the lone survivor's back, and he jerked in the water and rolled over. And his face was the face on the figurehead, and his scarlet eyes glared and his scarlet mouth belched blood as he sank down out of sight for the last time…

Which was when Clarke would start awake.

He started now as his telephone chirruped, then sighed his relief that his morbid chain of thoughts had been broken. He let the telephone chirp away to itself for a few moments, and considered his nightmare in the light of cold logic.

Clarke was no oneiromancer but the dream's interpretation seemed simple enough. Zek, to her own dismay, had pointed the finger of suspicion at Harry. As for the Aegean backdrop and the blood: these were hardly inappropriate in the circumstances and considering the occurrences of the recent past.

And the dream's conclusion? Papastamos had put an end to the horror but that wasn't significant, hadn't been the point of it. It didn't have to be Papastamos but could have been any one of them — except Clarke himself. That had been the point of it: that Darcy Clarke himself hadn't done it and didn't want it to happen. In fact he had tried to stop it. Just like, right now, he was less than eager to start anything…

The telephone was starting its fifth ring when he reached for it, but the relief he'd felt at the first chirrup was shortlived: his nightmare was right there on the other end of the wire.

'Darcy?' The Necroscope's voice was calm, collected, about as detached as Clarke had ever heard it.

'Harry?' Clarke pressed a button on his desk, ensuring the conversation would be recorded, and another which alerted the switchboard to start a trace. 'I'd thought I might have heard from you before now.'

'Oh, why?'

Harry asked good questions, and this one stopped Clarke dead. For after all, E-Branch didn't own Harry Keogh. 'Why — ' he thought quickly, ' — because of your interest in the serial killer case! I mean, it's been ten days since we met in Edinburgh; we've spoken only once since then. I suppose I'd been hoping you'd come up with something pretty quick.'

'And your people?' Harry returned. 'Your espers: have they come up with anything? Your telepaths and hunch-men, spotters, precogs and locators? Have the police come up with anything? No, they haven't, because if they had you wouldn't be asking me. Hey, I'm only one man, Darcy, and you have a whole gang!'

Clarke decided to play the other at his own circuitous game. 'OK, so tell me, to what do I owe the pleasure, Harry? I can't believe it's a social call.'

The Necroscope's chuckle — normal, however dry — brought a little more relief with it. 'You make a good sparring partner,' he said. 'Except you cry uncle too quick.' And before Clarke could counter, he went on: 'I need some information, Darcy, that's why I'm calling.'

Who am I talking to? Clarke wondered. What am I talking to? God, if only I could be sure it was you, Harry! I mean, all you, just you. But I can't be sure, and if it's not all you… then sooner or later it will be my job to do something about it. Which, of course, was what his nightmare was all about. But out loud he only said, 'Information? How can I help you?'

Two things,' Harry told him. The first one's a big one: details of the other murdered girls. Oh, I know I could get them for myself; I have friends in the right places, right? But this time I'd prefer not to put the teeming dead to the trouble.'

'Oh?' Clarke was curious. Suddenly Harry sounded cagey. Put the Great Majority to the trouble? But the dead would do anything for the Necroscope — even rise from their graves!

'We've asked enough of the dead,' Harry tried to explain himself, almost as if he'd read Clarke's mind. 'Now it's time we did them a few favours.'

Still puzzled, Clarke said, 'Give me half an hour and I'll duplicate everything we have for you. I can mail it or… but no, that would be silly. You can simply pick it up yourself, right here.'

Again Harry's chuckle. 'You mean via the Möbius Continuum? What, and set off all those alarms again?' He stopped chuckling. 'No, mail it,' he said. 'You know I'm not struck on that place of yours. You espers give me the shivers!'

Clarke laughed out loud. It was forced laughter but he hoped the other wouldn't notice. 'And what's the other thing I can do for you, Harry?'

'That's easy,' said the Necroscope. 'You can tell me about Paxton.'

It was delivered like a bolt out of the blue, and quite deliberately. 'Pax — ?' The smile slid from Clarke's face, was replaced by a frown. Paxton? What about Paxton? He didn't know anything about him — only that he'd done a few months' probation as an esper, a telepath, and that the Minister Responsible had found cause to reject him: something about a couple of small kinks in his past record, apparently.

'Yes, Paxton,' Harry said again. 'Geoffrey Paxton? He's one of yours, isn't he?' There was an edge to his voice now, an almost mechanical precision which was cold and controlled. Like a computer waiting for some vital item of information before it could begin its calculations.

'Was,' Clarke finally answered. 'Was going to be one of ours, yes. But it seems he had a couple of black marks against him and so missed the boat. How do you know about him, anyway? Or more to the point, what do you know about him?'

'Darcy.' The edge on Harry's voice had sharpened. It wasn't menacing — there was no threat in it, no way — but still Clarke could sense its warning. 'We've been friends, of sorts, for a long time. I've stuck my neck out for you. You've stuck yours out for me. I'd hate to think you were shafting me now.'

'Shafting you?' Clarke's answer was instinctive, natural, even mildly affronted; with every right, for he wasn't hiding anything or shafting anyone. 'I don't even know what you're talking about! It's like I said: Geoffrey Paxton is a middling telepath, but developing rapidly. Or he was. Then we lost him. Our Minister found something he didn't like and Paxton was out. Without us he won't ever be able to develop to his full potential. We'll give him the onceover now and then, just to make sure he's not using what he has to take too much of an advantage on society, but apart from that — '

'But he's already taking advantage,' the Necroscope, plainly angry now, cut in. 'Or trying to — and of me! He's on my back, Darcy, and he sticks like glue. He tries to get into my mind, but so far I've kept him out. Only that takes effort, gets tiring, and I'm getting pissed off exerting so much effort on something like this! On some sneaking little bastard who's doing someone else's dirty work!'

For a moment Clarke's mind was full of confusion, but he knew that to hesitate would only make him look suspect. 'What do you want me to do?' he said.

'Find out who's running him, of course!' Harry snapped. 'And why.'

'I'll do what I can.'

'Do better than that,' Harry came back like a shot. 'Or I'll have to do it myself.'

Why haven't you already? Clarke wondered. Are you afraid of Paxton, Harry? And if so, why? 'I've told you he isn't one of mine,' he said out loud. 'Now that's the truth, so you can't threaten me through him. But like I said, I'll do what I can.'

There was a pause. Then: 'And you'll get the details of those girls to me?'

'That's a promise.'

'OK.' The Necroscope's voice had slackened a little, lost some of its tension. 'I… I didn't mean to come on so strong, Darcy.'

Clarke's heart at once went out to him. 'Harry, I think you've a lot on your mind. Maybe we can speak sometime — in person, I mean? What I'm saying is, don't be afraid to come to me.'

'Afraid?'

It had been the wrong word. 'Apprehensive, then. I mean, don't worry that there might be something you can't tell me or we can't talk about. There isn't anything you can't tell me, Harry.'

Again that long, perhaps indicative pause. Then: 'But right now I don't have anything to tell you, Darcy. However, I'll get back to you if I ever do.' 'Is that a promise?' 'Yes, that's a promise too. And Darcy — thanks.'

Clarke sat and thought about it for long minutes. And while he sat there behind his desk, drumming his fingers in a continuous, monotonous tattoo, so he became aware of the first small warning bells growing to an insistent clamour at the back of his mind. Harry Keogh had required him to find out who was running Paxton. But who could be running him if not E-Branch? And to what end?

The last man to occupy this desk had been Norman Harold Wellesley, a traitor. Wellesley was gone now, dead, but the fact that he'd ever existed at all — and in this of all jobs — must have caused ructions further up the line. What, a double-agent? A spy among mindspies? Something which must never be allowed to happen again, obviously; but how to stop it from happening again? Could it be that someone had been appointed to watch the watchers?

It reminded Clarke of a ditty his mother had used to say to him when he was small and had an itch. She would find the spot and scratch it, reciting:

'Big fleas have little fleas

upon their backs to bite 'em.

And little fleas have smaller fleas,

and so ad infinitum!'

Was Clarke himself under esper scrutiny? And if so, what had been read from his mind?

He got on to the switchboard, said: 'Get me the Minister Responsible. If he's not available, leave a message that he's to call me back soonest. Also, I'd like someone to run me off a duplicate set of police reports on those girls in that serial killer case.'

Half an hour later the reports were delivered to him, and as he was putting them in a large envelope he got his call from the Minister. 'Yes, Clarke?'

'Sir,' he said, 'I just had Harry Keogh on the 'phone.'

'Oh?'

'He asked for a set of reports on the girls in the serial killer case. As you'll recall, we asked for his help on that.'

'I recall that you asked for his help, Clarke, yes. But in fact I'm not so sure it was a good idea. Indeed, I think it's time to rethink our attitude towards Keogh.'

'Oh?'

'Yes. I know he's been of some assistance to the Branch, and — '

'Some?' Clarke had to cut in. 'Some assistance? We'd have all been goners long ago without him. We can't ever repay him. Not just us but everyone. And I do mean everyone.'

Things change, Clarke,' said that unseen, unknown other. 'You people are a weird lot — no offence — and Keogh has to be the weirdest of all. Also, he's not really one of you. So as of now I want you to avoid contact with him. But we'll talk about him again later, I'm sure.'

The warning bells rang even louder. Talking to the Minister Responsible was always like talking to a very smooth robot, but this time he was just too smooth. 'And the police reports? Does he get them?'

'I think not. Let's just keep him at arm's length for the moment, right?'

'Is there something to worry about, maybe?' Clarke came straight out with it. 'Do you think perhaps we should watch him?'

'Why, you surprise me!' said the other, smooth as ever. 'It was my understanding that Keogh had always been a good friend of yours.'

'He has.'

'Well, and doubtless that was of value at the time. But as I said, things change. I will get back to you about him — one way or the other — in good time. But until then… was there anything else?'

'One small thing.' Clarke kept his tone neutral but scowled at the 'phone. 'About Paxton…'It was a leaf straight out of Harry Keogh's book, and it worked just as well for Clarke.

'Paxton?' (He actually heard the Minister catch his breath!) Then, more cautiously, perhaps curiously: 'Paxton? But we're no longer interested in him, are we?'

'It's just that I was reading through his records,' Clarke lied, 'his progress reports, you know? And it seemed to me we lost a good one there. Is it possible you've been maybe a bit too thorough? A shame to lose him if there's a chance we can bring him on. We really can't afford to waste talents like his.'

'Clarke,' the Minister sighed, 'you have your side of the job, and I have mine. I don't question your decisions, do I?'

Don't you?

'And I really would appreciate it if you wouldn't question mine. Forget about Paxton, he's out of it.'

'As you wish — but I think I'll at least keep an eye on him. If only from a distance. After all, we're not the only ones in the mindspy game. I'd hate it if he were recruited by the other side…'

The Minister was getting peeved. 'For the moment you have quite enough work on your plate!' he snapped. 'Leave Paxton be. A periodic check will suffice — when I say so!'

Clarke was only polite when people were polite to him. He was far too important to let himself be stepped on. 'Keep your shirt on… sir,' he growled. 'Anything I say or do is in the Branch's best interest, believe me — even when I step on toes.'

'Of course, of course.' The other was at once conciliatory. 'But we're all in the same boat, Clarke, and none of us knows everything. So for the time being let's just trust each other, all right?'

Oh, yeah, let's! Sure! 'Fine,' Clarke said. 'I'm sorry I've taken up so much of your time.'

'That's all right. We'll be speaking again soon, I'm sure…'

Clarke put the 'phone down and continued to scowl at it a while, then sealed the envelope containing the police reports and scrawled Harry Keogh's address on it. He erased his and Keogh's recent conversation, then asked the switchboard if they'd traced the call. They had and it was Harry's Edinburgh number. He 'phoned it direct but got no answer. And finally he called a courier into his office and gave him the envelope.

'Post it, please,' he said, but before the courier could leave: 'No, repackage the whole thing and send it off special delivery. And then forget you ever saw it, right?'

In a little while he was alone with his dark, suspicious thoughts again, and an itch between his shoulderblades which he couldn't quite get at.

And his mother's ditty about fleas, which was equally persistent.

3 Changeling

Harry Keogh, Necroscope, didn't know Darcy Clarke's ditty, but he did have a flea on his back. Several, in fact. And they were biting him.

Geoffrey Paxton was only one and probably the least of them, but because he was reachable and immediate he was the most frightening. Harry wasn't frightened of Paxton, rather of what he might do to Paxton if he lost control. And of what losing control might conceivably do to him, to the Necroscope himself. He knew how easy it would be to betray himself and reveal that he was no longer an innocent but that some great and as yet undeveloped (but developing, certainly) Darkness had entered him.

That was what Paxton was looking for, Harry knew: proof that the Necroscope was no longer a fit citizen or habitant of Earth — no longer, indeed, a man, not entirely — but an alien creature and a monstrous threat. And when he knew it for sure, when there was no longer any doubt, then Paxton would report that fact and there would be war. Harry Keogh versus The Rest. The rest of Mankind. And that was the last thing Harry wanted, to be at odds with a world and its peoples which he had fought so long and so hard to keep safe.

Paxton, then, was a flea on Harry's back, a niggle at the edge of — attempting to dig its way deeper into — his mind, an irritation. And because Paxton's presence was representative of an even greater threat, which must ultimately challenge the Necroscope's very existence, it was something Harry could well do without. For to the Wamphyri the single 'honourable' answer to any challenge may only be written in blood!

Wamphryri!

The word itself was… a Power.

It was a tingling in the core of his being, an awareness of passions beyond the feeble, fumbling emotions of men, a savage, explosive nuclear energy contained — but barely — in his seething blood. It was a chain-reaction which was happening to him even now, whose catalyst was blood. And in itself it, too, was a challenge. But one which he must resist, which he must not, dare not answer. Not if he desired to remain ascendant and for the most part human.

A flea, then, this Paxton. An invader who would stick his proboscis in that most private and inviolable of all human territories, the mind itself, and siphon out its thoughts. A spy, a thought-thief- a parasite come to sup on Harry's secrets — a flea. But only one flea of several, and not one whose bites he could afford to scratch.

Another unbearable itch was the fact that the dead — the Great Majority of mankind, who yet lay apart from and unknowable to mankind, with the sole (the soul?) exception of Harry Keogh — were withdrawing from him. He was losing his rapport; the change in him had wrought a change in them. Their trust was weakening.

Oh, there were many among them who owed him beyond their means to repay, and many more who had loved him for his own sake, to whom the Necroscope had always been the one glimmer of light in an otherwise everlasting darkness, but even these were wary of him now. For when he had been simply Harry — unsullied and unsullying, innocent and gentle — why, then it had been a marvellous thing that he could touch the dead and they touch him! But all of that was yesterday.

And now that he was more than Harry? There are certain things which even dead men fear, and limits to what even they will lie still for…

Since the destruction of Janos Ferenczy and his works, Harry had been busy. Other than the constant irritation of Geoffrey Paxton the only intrusion he'd allowed — the single distraction from his purpose, because he had no control over it — was the knowledge that a necromancer lived and practised his abominations in England. It distracted him because Penny Sanderson was now his friend (his ward, even?) and because he was privy to what she and others like her had gone through.

Of the fact that the forces of law and order would track down and apprehend Penny's torturer, murderer, and then violator eventually, Harry had little doubt; but they would never charge him with the full range of his offences, because they had no yardstick by which to measure them. They neither knew nor were capable of defining a full range of offences, not in this case. And certainly there was no punishment which would fit the crime. Not in law.

But the Necroscope fully understood the nature of this beast and his crimes, and his ideas of punishment were rather more stringent. Even before his contamination he'd had that. It was a flame which had been sparked in him by the murder of his own sweet mother, and which burned just as lively to this day. An eye for an eye.

As to what Harry had been doing since removing the last of the Ferenczys forever from the world of men: his works had been weird and wonderful, and the thoughts in his Möbius mind even more so.

To begin with, he'd brought back Trevor Jordan's ashes from Rhodes. The incorporeal telepath had wished it (death might have some sort of meaning with Harry to talk to), but not even Jordan had suspected Harry's real purpose.

By themselves, however, the essential salts of a man were insufficient to put Harry's plan into action, not and achieve the entirely satisfactory result which he sought. Which was why, before reducing further the ruins of Janos Ferenczy's castle, the Necroscope had removed from them certain chemical substances by means of which Janos had performed his own monstrous brand of necromancy.

Not all of the dead would wish for such a resurgence, Harry knew: the Thracian warrior-king Bodrogk and his wife Sofia, whose world had lain two thousand years in the past, had been happy to collapse in each other's arms and return to dust (a merciful release for them, who had prayed for it so often). But what of the much more recently dead?

Like Trevor Jordan, for instance?

The answer might seem easy: why not ask him? But in fact that was the hardest thing of all. 'I intend to return you to life. I have the apparatus but I'm not one hundred per cent sure of the system. It worked perfectly well for another, but he had the advantage of many hundreds of years of experimentation. In the event all goes well you will be as you were; except, well… you'll recall that you did put a bullet through your brain. I'm not entirely sure how that will affect you. If when I call you up from your ashes I discover that you're a complete gibbering fucking idiot then, however reluctantly, I'll be obliged to put you down again. Now, provided you're perfectly happy with all of this

Or, in Penny Sanderson's case: 'Penny, I think I can bring you back. But if I get the mixture wrong it could be that you'll not be as lovely as you were. I mean, your skin and features could be imperfect, or blemished, or pocked… hideously. For example, some of the things I called up in the Castle Ferenczy were quite monstrous; there were depletions, inconsistencies, er, anomalies? Wherefore I reserve the right to erase you if things go wrong. But of course we'll always be able to try again, later, when with a bit of luck I'll get it right.'

No, he couldn't tell them what he had in mind, not yet. If he gave them the bare bones of the matter they'd require him to flesh it out, and if he elaborated they'd fret about every smallest detail. And from now until the actual — resurrection? — they'd mix anticipation with dread, alternating shivers of excitement with shudders of terror most extreme. They'd climb high mountains of hope, only to tumble back into black lakes of deepest despair and depression.

'I have a shot which may cure your cancer… but it just might give you AIDS.'

That was how it would feel to Harry, if the roles were reversed; but at the same time he knew that of course it wasn't like that: when you're dead you're beyond hope, and so any hope has to be better than none. Or does it? Or was that simply the vampire in him — tenacity aspiring to immortality — doing his thinking for him?

Or… perhaps he hesitated for another, far more elemental reason: something which warned him that with his small talents (small, yes, in the scale of a universe or parallel multiverses) he must not, dare not, usurp one of the Greater Talents of that Other whom men called God? History's necromancers, among which Janos had been a latecomer, had dared it, and where were they now? Had there been avenging angels before Harry, to put right the wrongs of these wizards? And if so, would there be one after him, to chastise him in his turn?

Harry had been the Necroscope, was becoming a vampire, and now would be a necromancer in his own right. How dare he seek out Penny's murderer to punish him on the one hand, and on the other pursue the practice of that same black art? What would be his punishment?

Perhaps the gears were already engaged, the wheels even now turning. Perhaps the Necroscope had already gone too far, disturbing the delicate balance between Good and Evil to such an extent that it now required radical readjustment. Had he simply become too powerful, which is to say corrupt? How did the old saying go: 'Absolute power corrupts absolutely'? Ridiculous! Was God Himself corrupt? No, for the maxims of men are like their laws: they apply only to men.

Such arguments were endless in the metamorphosis of the Necroscope's mind and body, until sometimes he thought he was mad. But when his thoughts were clear he knew that he was not mad; it was just the thing that was in him, altering his perceptions along with everything else.

And then he would remember how he used to be, determine that he must always be that way, and know that he hesitated only out of consideration for his friends among the dead. It was simply that he didn't want Trevor and Penny to suffer agonies of protracted uncertainty, only to let them down when the waiting was over. To die once is enough, as had been made perfectly plain by Janos's many Thracian thralls in the bowels of the Castle Ferenczy.

As for God: if there was such a One (and Harry had never been sure) then the Necroscope supposed he must consider his talents God-given and use them accordingly. While he could.

Harry had spent a good deal of his time arguing, not least with himself. If a subject took his fancy — almost any subject — he would play word-games with himself to the point of distraction and delirium: a sort of mental masturbation. But it wasn't just himself he was jerking off; in conversations with the dead he was equally argumentative, even when he suspected that they were right and he was wrong.

Indeed, he seemed to argue for the sake of it, out of sheer contrariness. He thought and argued about God; also about good and evil, about science, pseudoscience and sorcery, their similarities, discrepancies and ambiguities. Space, time and space-time fascinated him, and especially mathematics with its inalienable laws and pure logic. The very changelessness of maths was a constant joy and relief to the Necroscope's changeling mind in its changeling body.

Within a day or two of returning from the Greek islands he had used the instantaneous medium of the Möbius Continuum to go to Leipzig and see (speak to) August Ferdinand Möbius where he lay in his grave. Möbius had been and still was a great mathematician and astronomer; indeed he was the man whose genius had saved Harry's life on several occasions, again through the medium of his Möbius Continuum. But while Harry's primary purpose in visiting Möbius was to thank him for the return of his numeracy, instead he ended up arguing with him.

The great man had happened to mention that his next project would be to measure space, and as soon as the Necroscope heard this he threw himself headlong into an argument. This time the argument was 'Space, Time, Light and the Multiverses'.

Won't 'Universe' suffice? Möbius had wanted to know.

'Not at all,' Harry had answered, 'because we know there are parallels. I've visited one, remember?' (And East German students with their notebooks had wondered at this peculiar man who stood by a dead scientist's tomb muttering to himself.)

Very well then, let's concentrate on the one we know best, Möbius had been logical about it. This one.

'You'll measure it?'

I propose to.

'But since it's constantly expanding, how will you go about it?'

I shall stand at its outermost rim, beyond which there is nothing, transfer myself instantaneously through the universe to the far rim, beyond which there is likewise nothing, and in so doing measure the distance between. Then I shall transfer myself instantaneously back here and perform the same experiment exactly one hour later, and again an hour after that.

'Good!' Harry had answered. 'But… to what purpose?'

(A sigh.) Why, from that time forward — and whenever I require to know it — a correct calculation of the size of the universe will be instantly available!

Harry had stayed grudgingly silent for a moment, until: 'I too have given the matter a little thought,' he said. 'Though purely on the theoretical level, because the physical measurement of a constantly changing quantity seems rather fruitless to me. Whereas to understand what is happening, how and to what degree the age of the universe is tied to its rate of expansion — a constant, incidentally — and so forth, seems so much more satisfying.'

(An astonished pause.) Oh, indeed! And Harry had almost been able to see Möbius's eyebrows joining in a frown across the bridge of his nose. 'You' have thought about it, have you? Theoretically, you say? And might I inquire as to 'your' conclusions?

'You want to know all about space, time, light and the multiverses?'

If you've the time for it! Möbius had been scathing in his sarcasm.

To which the Necroscope had answered: 'Your initial measurement will suffice; no other is necessary. Knowing the size of the universe — and not only this one, incidentally, but all the parallels, too — at any given moment of time, we will automatically know their exact age and rate of expansion, which will be uniform for all of them.'

Explain.

'Now the theory,' said Harry. 'In the beginning there was nothing. Came the Primal Light! Possibly it shone out of the Möbius Continuum, or perhaps it came with the colossal fireball of the Big Bang. But it was the beginning of the universe of light. Before the light there was nothing, and after it there was a universe expanding at the speed of lightr

Eh?

'Do you disagree?'

The universe was expanding at the speed of light?

'Actually, at twice the speed of light,' said Harry. 'That was the essence of your problem, remember, which sparked the return of my numeracy? Switch on a light in space and a pair of observers 186,000 miles away from it on opposite sides would both see its light one second later, because the light expands in both directions. Now, do you disagree?'

Of course not! The Primal Light, as any light, must have expanded just as you say. But… the universe?

'At the same speed!' said Harry. 'And it still is expanding at that speed.'

Explain. And make it good.

'Before the light there was nothing, no universe.'

Agreed.

'Does anything travel faster than light?'

No — yes! We can, but only in the Möbius Continuum. And I suppose thought is likewise instantaneous.

'Now think!' said Harry. The Primal Light is still travelling outwards, expanding on all frontiers at a constant speed of 186,000 miles per second. Tell me: does anything lie beyond those frontiers? And I do mean any thing?'

Of course not, because in the physical universe nothing travels faster than light.

'Exactly! Wherefore light defines the extent — the size — of the universe! That's why I called it the universe of light. A formula:

aU = rU

c

Do you disagree?'

Möbius had looked at the thing scrawled on the screen of Harry's mind. The age of the universe is equal to its radius divided by the speed of light. And after a moment, but very quietly now: Yes, I agree.

'Hah!' said Harry. 'It's hard to get a decent argument going these days. Everyone cries uncle.'

Möbius had been angry. He had never seen Harry like this before. Certainly the Necroscope's instinctive maths was a wonderful thing, an awesome talent in its own right, but where was Harry's humility? What on earth had got into him? Perhaps Möbius should let him continue to expound and then try to pick holes, bring him down a peg or two.

And time? And the multiverses?

But Harry had been ready for him: 'The space-time universe — which has the same size and age as any and all of the parallels — is cone-shaped, the point of the cone being the Big Bang/Primal Light where time began, and the base being its current boundary or diameter. Is that feasible, logical?'

Desperately seeking errors, still Möbius had been unable to discover them. Yes, he was obliged to answer, eventually. Feasible, logical, but not necessarily correct.

'Grant me feasible,' said Harry. 'And then tell me: what lies outside the cone?'

Nothing, since the universe is contained within it.

'Wrong! The parallels are cone-shaped, too, born at the same time and expanding from the same source!'

Möbius had pictured it. But… then each cone is in contact with a number of other cones. Is there evidence of this?

'Black holes,' said Harry at once, 'which juggle with matter and so perform a necessary balancing act. They suck matter out of universes which are too heavy, into universes which are too light. White holes are, of course, the other ends of the black holes. In space-time such holes are the lines of contact between cones, but in space they are simply — ' (a shrug,) ' — holes.'

Möbius was tired, but: Cones are circular in cross-section, he'd argued. Put three together and you get a triangular shape between them.

And Harry had nodded his agreement. 'Grey holes. There's one at the bottom of the Perchorsk ravine, and another up an underground river in Romania.'

And so he'd made his point and won his argument, if there had been one to win in the first place. For the fact was he'd only argued for the sake of it and neither knew nor cared if he was right or wrong.

But Möbius had cared, because he didn't know if Harry was right or wrong either…

Another time, the Necroscope had talked to Pythagoras. Again his principal reason for going to see him was to convey his thanks (the great Greek mystic and mathematician had been of some assistance in his quest for numeracy), but again the visit had ended in argument.

Harry had thought to find the Greek's grave at Metapontum, or if not there then at Crotona in southern Italy. But all he found was a follower or two until, by pure chance, he stumbled upon the forgotten, 2,480-year-old tomb of a member of the Pythagorean Brotherhood on the Island of Chios. There was no marker; it was a stony, ochre place where goats ate thistles not fifty yards from a rocky shore looking north on the Aegean.

Pythagoras? No, not here, that one informed, in a hushed and very secretive manner, when Harry's deadspeak broke into his centuried thoughts. He is elsewhere, waiting out his time.

'His time?'

Until his metempsychosis, into a living, breathing man!

'But do you converse? Are you able to contact him?'

He will occasionally contact us, when a thought has occurred to him.

'Us?'

The Brotherhood! But I have said too much. Begone. Leave me in peace.

'As you wish,' Harry had told him. 'But he won't thank you that you turned away the Necroscope.'

What? The Necroscope? (Astonishment, and awe.) You are that one, who taught the dead to speak out in their graves, so enabling them to talk to one another as in life?

'The same.'

And do you seek to learn from Pythagoras?

'I seek to instruct him.'

That is a blasphemy!

'Blasphemy?' Harry had raised an eyebrow. 'And is Pythagoras a god, then? If so, a painfully slow one! Consider this: I have already achieved my metempsychosis. Even now I embark upon a second phase, a new… condition.'

Your soul is in process of migration?

'I may say that a change is in the offing, certainly.'

And after a while: If I speak to our master Pythagoras on your behalf, and if you have lied to me, be sure he willdamn you with Numbers. Aye, and possibly me with you! No, I dare not. First prove yourself.

'Perhaps I can show you some numbers.' Harry had contained his impatience as best he could. 'As a member of the Brotherhood, I'm sure you will appreciate their importance.'

Do you seek to seduce me with your puny figures? What, the work of a mere lifetime? Are you suggesting that in the two thousand years and more which have passed since I was lain to rest here I've dreamed no numbers or equations or formulae of my own? Necroscope or none, you are presumptuous!

'Presumptuous?' Harry's anger had been aroused. 'Equations? Formulae? Why, I have formulae such as you could never dream.' And he'd displayed the computer screen of his mind, and covered it with the endlessly mutating algebraics of Möbius mathematics. Then he'd formed a Möbius door, and let the other gaze a moment upon the nowhere and everywhere across the threshold.

Until, gaspingly: What… what is that?!

The Big Zero,' Harry had growled then, letting the door close on itself. The place where all numbers begin. But I'm wasting my time. I came to talk to a master and ended up chatting with a mere student — and a middling one at that. Now tell me: do I get my audience with Pythagoras or don't I?'

He … he is in Samos.

'Where he was born?'

The same. The last place anyone would think to look for him, he thought… And then, frantically: Necroscope — plead with him for me! I have betrayed him! He will exclude me!

'Rubbish!' Harry had growled, but without scorn. 'Exclude you? He will elevate you — for you have gazed upon the secret mathematical door to all times and places.

You don't believe me?' (And he'd shrugged). 'Well, it's your choice. My thanks anyway — and farewell.' And conjuring another Möbius door he'd stepped through it -

— And out again on Samos, twenty miles away, where Pythagoras had spent his childhood two and a half millennia ago, and to which his bones had been returned in secrecy when at last he died. Pythagoras, however introvert, secretive, diffident, could hardly escape or ignore the Necroscope's deadspeak probe at such close range. That thought in itself had been deadspeak and as such the recluse (in death even more than in life) had heard it. And answered: What is your number?

'Any you choose for me,' Harry had shrugged, homing in on the mystic's mental whisper. And when he'd located him definitely, one further Möbius jump took him from a deserted, wooded shoreline straight there: to a small olive grove on a terraced hillside above a headland with a tiny white church. Down the coast a little way, scarcely glimpsed through pines and wind-warped oaks, Tigani's harbour glinted turquoise, blue, silver; music from a taverna came drifting on the bright summer air.

It was cool in the shade of the trees and the Necroscope had been grateful to take off his wide-brimmed hat, also the dark-lensed spectacles which protected his now delicate eyes. And because Pythagoras had remained silently thoughtful: There are numbers galore. I'm not fussy.'

Then you should be, the mystic's whisper was tremulous, fevered. They are The All. The gods themselves are numbers, though no man knows them. When I have discovered the numbers of the gods, then my metempsychosis may commence.

'If you truly believe that, then you've a long time to wait,' Harry had answered at once. 'You can know all the numbers in all their combinations from now to eternity and it won't change anything, not for you. It isn't a magical thing, Pythagoras. However many numbers you employ, your soul won't fly into a new body. There's no science or sorcery can help you now.'

Hah! the other was filled with wrath and not a little scorn. Only see who utters these blasphemies! And is this the Necroscope, who was impotent and innumerate, to whom the simplest sum was a mystery? Are you the one they pleaded for, the legions of dust, the teeming dead? Möbius came to me on his knees for you, and what are you after all but an ingrate?

Harry had been needled but hid it from the Greek. Likewise he hid his thoughts: Pompous old fart! While out loud: 'I came to thank you, for my numeracy. Without it I'd be like you: dust in a grave. Or perhaps not like you, for there was a man who would have called me up to torture me for my secrets.' A necromancer? 'Just so.' It is a black art!

'Not always. It has its uses. What I am doing now is a sort of necromancy after all. For I am a living man, talking to one who is dead.'

Pythagoras gave this a moment's thought, and: I overheard your conversation with one of the Brothers, he said. Is blasphemy your byword? You alleged reincarnation, transmigration, metempsychosis.

'I stated a fact,' said Harry. 'I was one man in his own body, and when it died I inhabited another. Don't take my word for it but ask the dead, who have nothing to gain from lying. They'll tell you it's true. Moreover, if your ashes were pure, I tell you I could even call you up from the dead! Not with numbers but with words. And this isn't blasphemy, Pythagoras, but simple truth. Or… perhaps the act itself would constitute blasphemy, I can't be sure. If so then you're right and I am a blasphemer, and plan to be again.'

You could call me up from my ashes?

'Only if they were pure, unsullied. Were you buried in a jar?'

I was buried in soil, in secret, here beneath your feet, where as a boy I ran among the trees. My flesh and bones are now one with the earth. Anyway, I cannot believe you. Words and not numbers? Words are from the lips, frivolous things which are spoken and change, while numbers spring from pure mind and are immutable.

'It's academic, after all,' Harry had shrugged. 'In two thousand years your salts have been washed into the soil. There are no words — and certainly no numbers — which can help you now.'

Blasphemy and sedition! Do you seek to turn my followers against me?

Harry could contain himself no longer. 'Pythagoras, you're a charlatan! In your world you guarded your small, pointless mathematical "secrets" — basic discoveries which any child under instruction knows today from his school-books — as if they were Life and Death. And true death has not changed you. I gave you deadspeak, since when you could have conferred with more modern, more genuine masters, if you'd wished it. To Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein; to Roemer, Maxwell and — '

Enough! the other had been outraged. I should have ignored Möbius! I should have -

'But you couldn't ignore him!' (Harry's turn to cut in.) 'You dared not…'

What do you mean?

'That I know your real secret. That you were a fraud. That you not only made fools of your precious "Brotherhood" in life but continue to deceive them in death! There is no mysticism in numbers, Pythagoras, and you must know it. If only because you're a learned man. Why, you yourself have told me that numbers are immutable, unchanging and unchangeable. Which means that they are solid truth, not flights of fancy! Iron truth, not ethereal magic.'

Liar! Liar! Pythagoras had raged. You twist words, change meanings!

'Why do you hide yourself, even from the dead?'

Because they have no understanding. Because their ignorance is contagious.

'No, because they know more than you! Your followers would desert you. You told them they would migrate, return again to men and meet with you in worlds of pure Number — and now you know that this was false.'

I thought it was truth.

'But that was two and a half thousand years ago. And are you returned? How long does it take to admit you were wrong?'

I have dreamed numbers that would blast you!

'Blast me, then.'

By this time Pythagoras had been sobbing. He hurled a catalogue of numbers at Harry, which shattered against the wall of the Necroscope's metaphysical mind. But at least they shocked him into recognition of his predicament: that again the thing inside was striving to replace him, this time by use of convoluted Wamphyri 'logic'.

On this occasion it was his salvation, for it had never been Harry's desire to hurt or even alarm the dead. And: 'I… I'm sorry,' he said.

Sorry? You are a fiend! Pythagoras had sobbed. But… you are right.

'No, I merely argued. Perhaps I am right, perhaps not. But I was wrong to argue for the sake of it. And let's face it, I stand in contradiction of my own argument.'

How so?

'I know that numbers are not immutable.' Ahhh! (A long drawn-out sigh.) Would you… could you demonstrate?

At which Harry had shown him the screen of his mind, with all of Möbius's configurations crawling on its surface, mutating and sprawling into infinity. And for a long time the old Greek had been silent. Then: I was a clever child who thought he knew everything, he said, his voice broken. Time has passed me by.

'But it will never forget you,' Harry had been quick to point out. 'We remember your theorem; books have been written about you; there are Pythagoreans even today.'

My theorem? My numbers? If I hadn't done it others would have.

'But it's your name we remember. And anyway, that could be said of anyone and anything.' Except the Necroscope.

But: 'I'm not even sure about that,' Harry had answered. 'I think that perhaps there were others before me. And certainly there was one after me. They dwell in other worlds now.' And will you dwell there, too? 'Possibly. Probably. And perhaps soon.'

What's it like now? Pythagoras had asked after a while, and Harry had suspected it was the first thing he'd inquired of anyone in a long time.

'Upon this island,' the Necroscope had answered, 'lie many of the more recently dead. But you've shunned them. You could have asked them about Samos, the world, the living. But you were afraid to know the truth. And do you know, the last thing of any importance to the living on this island is number? Well, perhaps not entirely true. I'm sure they're interested in the quantities of drachmae to the pound, to the Deutschmark and the dollar.' He explained his meaning.

The world is so small now!

Harry had put on his hat, his glasses, and gone out from the shade into sunlight. With his hands in his pockets the latter didn't bother him too much, but he must go slowly or lose his balance on the rough tracks and roads into Tigani. Pythagoras had gone with him, his deadspeak, anyway; distance wasn't too important once contact had been established.

I'll open up the Brotherhood, dissolve it entirely, put it aside. There's so much to learn.

'Men have landed on the moon,' said Harry.

Pythagoras's mind had flown in circles.

'They have calculated the speed of light.'

The old mystic's thoughts were one huge, astonished question mark.

'But you know, among the dead are those mathematicians who could benefit greatly from your knowledge.'

What, mine? I am an infant!

'Not a bit of it. You stuck to pure number. Why, in two thousand and more years, by now you're a lightning calculator! May I test you?'

By all means — but please, a simple thing. Not the dizzy designs inscribed upon your secret mind.

'Then give me the sum of all the numbers between one and one hundred, inclusive.'

Five thousand and fifty, Pythagoras's answer had been instantaneous.

'A lightning calculator,' Harry had been right. 'Among the less practical mathematicians — the theoretical mathematicians — why, you'd be like a talking slide-rule! I think that for a dead man you've a great future, Pythagoras.'

But it was such a simple thing. The Greek had been flattered. And known by heart. Multiplication, division, addition and subtraction — aye, and trigonometry, too — I've done it all so often. There isn't an angle I can't calculate.

There you are.' Harry had smiled. And, however drily: 'Believe me, there aren't many today who know all the angles.'

And you, Harry? Are you a lightning calculator? Harry hadn't wished to shatter him. 'Ah, but with me it's different, intuitive.'

Between one and a million, then!

'500,000,500,000,' the Necroscope had answered almost in the same breath. 'Take ten and multiply it by itself as many times as you like, and it works every time. Half of ten is five; put the two halves together again: 55. Half of a hundred is fifty, put the halves together: 5,050. And so on. "Magic" to some, intuition to me.'

Pythagoras had been downcast. Why would they need me when they already have you?

'Because, as I've stated, I may not be here too long. It's like you said: the world is a small place. And it's hard to find a hiding place.'

On the outskirts of Tigani he'd found a small taverna and seated himself in its shade, and ordered ouzo with a dash of lemonade. English girls splashed in the warm, blue waters of a small, rocky bay. Their breasts were shiny and Harry could smell the oil of coconut from here. Pythagoras had picked the picture from Harry's mind and scowled at it. Perhaps it's as well I'm unbodied to stay, he'd commented, darkly. Like vampires, they deplete a man.

For a moment the Necroscope had been caught off guard, but then: 'Ah!' he'd answered. 'But there are vampires and there are vampires…'

4 Someone Dying

The Necroscope's vampire — as yet a mere tadpole of alien, parasitic contamination — was immature. As such it had no desire for conflict either internal or external but wished only to evolve and get on with the long process of its host's conversion; which was why its influence was mainly enervating. Keep Harry mentally and emotionally drained, and he'd be less likely to jeopardize himself. Which by definition meant that he'd be less likely to jeopardize his horrific tenant. Hence his flashes of Wamphyri-awareness (half-glimpsed knowledge of burgeoning, ungovernable Power) and the burning need to argue and cross-examine, even to engage his own mind in long spells of intense self-inquisition, despite the bouts of inwardly-directed anger and mental exhaustion which invariably resulted.

But quite apart from the Necroscope's mind, his blood was also aware that the invader was here; it seemed filled with a weird psychic fever which kept him jumpy and constantly on guard. He was a man with a volcano inside him, which for now merely simmered and let off a little steam. Not knowing when the volcano was set to go off, he couldn't relax but must hold the cap firmly in place, and listen with a rapt, horrified and yet curious intentness to the rumbling within.

On the one hand Harry would like to test out his Wamphyri talents to the full (for they were part of him even now, while yet the physical side of the thing was still embryonic) but on the other he knew that to do so would be to accelerate the process. For one thing was certain: however immature his symbiont might be, it was also fast-growing and fast-learning. No slow starter, this vampire.

But while the parasite like all its kind would be dogged, the Necroscope was no less tenacious in his own right. His son had managed to keep his vampire in order, hadn't he? Like son, like father: Harry would do his damnedest to follow suit.

Except that would be hard enough in itself without the current recalcitrance of the Great Majority… and the knowledge or at least strong suspicion that E-Branch was gearing itself for war… and the fact that despite all of this Harry had determined to bring a certain fiend to justice but first must find him.

Previously he would have been able to work out a logical system of approach, like writing down an order of priorities. But his mental confusion and the weariness it produced obfuscated, so that while he was aware of the passage of time and of forces mobilizing against him, still he felt incapable of rising above and proceeding beyond his personal miasma. Which in turn brought frustration, more anger, and the first gale warnings that his whirling, gusting emotions craved physical release.

Like an alien autism incapable of self-expression, Harry could feel his violence lying just beneath the surface. His violence, yes, for the vampire in him was neither violent nor emotional: it merely amplified these properties in its host.

Perhaps most frustrating of all, he knew that none of the things he was doing — or would do if he felt capable — was of the slightest importance to his own personal survival. Another in his position might seek to change his identity, find a safe place, extricate himself permanently from all dangerous sources and focuses.

Or would he? Would he even be able to? For as Harry had pointed out to Pythagoras, the world is a small place.

And by definition any other in Harry's position would likewise be Wamphyri and territorial. This was his world; this house not far from Edinburgh was his house; especially his thoughts and actions were his territory — most of them, most of the time — at least when others weren't snooping on them.

Yesterday he had gone to the ruins of the Castle Ferenczy and spoken to Bodrogk the Thracian. Bodrogk was too recent a friend to have known Harry before the start of his transition; he accepted him for what he was now. Also, Bodrogk was fearless and in any case could not possibly fear the Necroscope, nor for that matter any other living man. His dust, and the dust of his wife Sofia, was scattered to the winds and only their spirits remained in the Carpathians now. They were quite beyond earthly harm.

The subject of Harry's inquiry had been the composition and proportions of the chemical ingredients of Janos Ferenczy's necromantic potions. He would retrieve Trevor Jordan and Penny Sanderson from their 'essential salts' only if he could bring them back perfect or as close to perfect as possible. Bodrogk, because he had been subjected to just such experiments, was an authority. Even so, he'd inquired at length into the Necroscope's purpose before passing on the necessary information.

And so today Harry had been ready to become a true necromancer in his own right, and would have proceeded… but at the last moment he'd felt that twinge, that covert tweaking at the corner of his mind, which had warned him that Geoffrey Paxton was close by and watching him. Knowing that Paxton was seeking to prove just such unnatural activity in him, Harry had been obliged to postpone the experiment. And then, barely able to control his rage, he'd spoken to Darcy Clarke at E-Branch HQ.

It had come as a relief to know that Paxton wasn't Darcy's man; but if not his, whose? Maybe Darcy would find out and let him know, and maybe not. And in any case what odds? For Harry knew that sooner or later Darcy and the others must all join forces against him. The hell of it was that the boss of E-Branch had been a good friend, once. The Necroscope couldn't see any way that he would ever be able to hurt Darcy. But how to explain that to the thing inside him?

At two in the afternoon Harry had sat quite still in his study and 'listened'. But his vampire awareness was still a fledgling thing and he'd detected nothing. Or maybe he had: the very briefest wriggle of something on the outermost rim of his perceptions. Whatever, it was suspicious enough that he'd put back his experiment yet again, then rammed his wide-brimmed hat on to his head and gone outdoors to talk to his mother.

Now, sitting on the crumbling river bank, Harry dangled his legs and looked down into the gently swirling water which had been Mary Keogh's grave for most of his life, and let his deadspeak thoughts reach out to her. Since there was no one here to see him, he simply spoke to her, which was also deadspeak and felt far more natural: 'Ma, I'm in a mess.'

If she'd answered: 'So what's new?' he would understand; it seemed he was always in a mess. But Mary Keogh loved her son as all mothers do, and death had not diminished that.

Harry? her voice seemed very faint now, very distant, as if she'd been washed away downriver along with her physical shell. Oh, Harry, I know you are, son.

Well, and that was only to be expected. He'd never been able to hide anything from his Ma, who had warned him often enough that there are some things you daren't get too close to. This time he'd let himself get too close. 'Do you know what I'm talking about?'

There's only one thing you can be talking about, son, (she sounded so sad, so sorry for him). And even if you hadn't come to speak to me, still I would know. All of us know, Harry.

He nodded. 'They're not so keen to talk to me any more,' he said, maybe a little bitterly. 'And yet I never harmed a single one of them.'

But you should try to understand, Harry, she was at pains to explain. The Great Majority were once living and now are dead. They remember what life was, and they know what death is, but they don't understand and want nothing to do with anything that lies between. They can't understand something which preys on the living to make them undead, which takes away true life and replaces it with soulless greed and lust and… and evil. The children and grandchildren of the teeming dead are still in the world of the living, and so are you. And that's what worries them. It makes no difference how long people are dead, Harry, they still worry about their children. But you know that, son, don't you?

Harry sighed. Her deadspeak, however faint (and possibly even chiding?) was as warm as ever. It covered the Necroscope like a blanket, kept him safe, made it easier to think and plan and even dream. It was so alien to the nightmare thing inside him that that part of Harry could neither understand nor interfere with it. Namely, it was the love of his mother, soothing as nothing else could ever be.

'But the point is,' he said, in a little while, 'that I've one more thing to do before I… before I'm finished here. And it's important, Ma. Important to me, and to you and the teeming dead alike. There's a monster running loose, and I have to nail him.'

A monster, son? Her voice was very soft, but he knew what she meant. Who was he to talk about monsters?

'Ma, I've done nothing wrong,' he answered. 'And so long as I'm me, I'm not going to.'

Harry, she said, son, I'm all used up. And she wasn't only faint but very tired, too. We're not inexhaustible. Left alone we'd just go on thinking our thoughts, gradually fading as all things do. We do fade in the end, be it ever so long. But torn by outside influences we go that much faster. I think that's how it works, anyway. You were a light in our long night, son, and it was like we could see again. But now we have to let you go and suffer the darkness. Alive we used to wonder: is there anything on the other side? Well, there was, and then you came and joined us up, and there was a kind of life again. So now I wonder: what's next? What I'm telling you is I haven't long here. But I'd hate to leave you not knowing you were all right. What are your plans, Harry?

And for the first time he realized that he really did need a plan. As simply as that, his mother had cut through all of his confusion.

'Well, there's a place I can go,' he finally answered. 'Not much of a place, but better than dying… I think. And there's someone there who can teach me things, if he's willing. He had problems, too, but the last time I saw him he was coping. Maybe he still is. Maybe I can learn something from him.'

She knew where, who and what he meant, of course. But isn't that a sinister sort of place, Harry?

'It was.' He shrugged. 'Maybe it still is. But at least I won't be hunted there. I would be hunted here, eventually, if I stayed. Which means I'd be forced to hunt, too. And that's what I'm afraid of and what I'm trying to avoid. I'm a plague in a bottle, Ma, safe only so long as no one shakes or tries to break me. But in that other place the plague has already run its course. What's unthinkable here is understood there. Not acceptable, never that, but a reality all the same.'

She sighed. I'm glad you're not just giving in, son. And with something of her old fondness: You're a fighter, Harry. You always were.

'I suppose I was,' he agreed, 'but I can't fight here. That would only bring it on. And in the end I'm afraid it might be stronger than me. There are still things I have to do here, that's all, business that needs clearing up. Which is how I'll occupy myself until it's time. You asked about my plans.

They're simple, really. When my head's on straight I can read them like words in a book. There's a girl who died horribly and didn't deserve it, because no one deserves to die like that; and there's the creature who killed her and other innocents like her, who does deserve it. There's a long talk — an explanation — which I owe to Darcy Clarke; and oh, there are talents I'd like to gather, which might be useful to me in the other place.

'That's all of it: a few things to do, something I have to straighten out, and one or two new things to learn. And then it will be time I walked. I'd rather walk than be chased.'

And you'll never come back?

'I might, if I learned how to hold the thing permanently in check. But if I can't… no, never.'

How will you deal with this man, murderer, monster you're looking for?

'As quick and as cleanly as he'll let me. You don't know what he does, Ma, but I can tell you I won't soil my hands on him, not if I can help it. Killing him will be like cutting out a tumour in the flesh of humanity.'

You've cut out a few of those, son.

'And one more to go,' Harry nodded.

And the girl who doesn't deserve to be dead? That was a strange way of putting it, Harry.

'It's such a recent thing for her, Ma,' (Harry knew he'd strayed into a minefield, looked in vain for a safe landmark). 'She's not used to it yet. And… and she doesn't have to get used to it. I mean, I can help her.'

You've learned a new thing, Harry, she answered, but very slowly, and he sensed something different in her voice which was never there before — fear? You learned it from Janos Ferenczy, and I can feel it. Yes, and it's what puts you apart from us now. We can all feel it! And suddenly her deadspeak was wracked with small shudders.

His Ma, too? Had he alienated even his warm, sweet Ma? Suddenly he had the feeling that if he let her go she'd just drift away from him and keep on drifting. Perhaps into that beyond place which she sensed waiting there.

But he had one trump card left, and now played it: 'Ma, am I good or bad? Was I born good or evil?'

She read the anxiety in his deadspeak and returned at once. Oh, you were good, son. How can you doubt it? You were always so good!

'Well, nothing's changed, Ma. Not yet, and not here. I promise you, I won't let anything change me, not here. If and when I feel it — as soon as I feel I can't hold it any longer-then I'll go.'

But if you bring that girl back, what will she be?

'Beautiful, just as she was. Maybe not physically beautiful — though it's a fact she was lovely — but alive. And that's to be beautiful. You know that.'

But for how long, son? I mean, will she age? Will she die? What will she be? What will she be, Harry?!

He had no answer. 'Just a girl. I don't know.'

And her children? What will they be?

'Ma, I don't know! I only know she's too much alive to be dead.'

Are you doing it for… yourself?

'No, just for her, and for all of you.'

He sensed her shaking her head. I don't know, son. I just don't know.

Trust me, Ma.'

Well, I suppose I'll have to. So how can I help?

Harry was eager now, except: 'Ma, I don't want to weaken you. You said you were all used up.'

So I am, but if you can fight so can I. If the dead won't talk to you, maybe they'll still talk to me. While they can.

He nodded his gratitude and in a little while said: 'There were others before Penny Sanderson. I know their names from the newspapers, but I have to know where they were laid to rest and I need an introduction. See, they were badly hurt and probably won't trust someone like me, who can touch them from this side. I mean, the one who killed them, he could do that, too. While I do need to talk to them, I don't want to frighten them more than they already are. So you see, without you it would be just too difficult.'

So you want to know which graveyards they're in, right?

'Right. It probably wouldn't be too hard to find out for myself, but there are so many things on my mind that keep getting in the way. And so time goes by.'

All right, Harry, I'll do what I can. But I don't want to have to track you down any more, so it would be better if you came to see me. That way I… She paused, cut off abruptly.

'Ma?'

Didn't you feel that, son? I always feel it, when they're close by like that.

'What was it?'

Someone joining us, she answered, sadly. Someone dying. Some thing, anyway.

A medium in life, in death Mary Keogh's contact with death was that much sharper. But what had she meant? It wasn't clear, and Harry felt the short hairs prickle on the back of his neck. 'Some… thing?' he repeated her.

A pet, a puppy, an accident, she sighed. And some poor child's heart broken. In Bonnyrig. Just this minute.

The Necroscope felt his own heart give a start; he'd lost so much during his life that the thought of another's loss, however small, stung him with its poignancy. Or maybe it was just the way his mother had reported the occurrence, so soulfully. Or there again it could be an effect of his heightened emotional awareness. Maybe there was someone he could comfort.

'Bonnyrig, did you say? Ma, I'll be going now. I'll come and see you tomorrow. Maybe you'll know something by then.'

Take care, son.

Harry stood up, looked up and down the river and across it to the other side. The bright sun had passed behind fluffy, drifting clouds, which was a relief.

He climbed a tottering fence and entered a small copse, and in the dappled heart of the greenery conjured a Möbius door. A moment later and he emerged in a back alley close to the high street in Bonnyrig. And letting his deadspeak sensitivity spread out around him like a fan or cobweb, he searched for a newcomer among the ranks of the dead.

And there it was, close by: a whining yelp in memory of the panic and pain of a few moments ago, and a certain astonishment that the pain was no longer here, and disbelief that the bright day could so quickly turn black and blacker than night. A dumb animal's perception of sudden death.

Harry understood it very well, for it wasn't too dissimilar to the reaction of a human being. The only difference being that dogs have neither foreknowledge of nor preoccupation with death, so that their surprise is that much greater. But strike or kick a dog unjustly or cruelly and it will draw back with just the same astonishment, the same disbelief.

Taking a chance that he wasn't observed, the Necroscope used the Möbius Continuum to follow the pup's thoughts to their source: a kerbside in the main village street, at a junction where the street turned left on to the main road into Edinburgh. A workday, there weren't many people about; the handful which had gathered had their backs to Harry anyway where he emerged on to the pavement as if from thin air. And the first thing he saw was the long, dark skidmark burned into the road's surface.

The pup's deadspeak thoughts were more desperate now as it realized that it couldn't extricate itself from this new predicament. There was no feeling, no contact, no light. Where was its God, its young master?

Shh! Harry hushed. It's OK, boy! It's all right! Shh!

He moved to the forefront of the handful of onlookers, saw a young boy kneeling there in the gutter, his cheeks shiny with tears, the broken pup dead in his arms. One of the pup's shoulders was askew and its spine kinked; its right foreleg flopped like a rubber band; its crushed head oozed brain fluid from a torn right ear.

Harry got down on one knee, put an arm round the boy and stroked the dead pet. And again: 'Shh, boy!' He comforted both of them. And in his mind the pup's whines and yelps quietened to a panting whimper. It could feel again. It felt Harry.

But the boy couldn't be comforted. 'He's dead!' he kept moaning. 'He's dead! Paddy's dead! Why didn't the car hit me and not Paddy? Why didn't the car stop?'

'Where do you live, son?' Harry asked the boy, a towhead of maybe eight or nine.

The other glanced at him through blurred-blue eyes. 'Down there.' He nodded vaguely over his right shoulder. 'Number seven. We live there, Paddy and me.'

Harry took the dog gently into his arms and stood up. 'Let's get him home then,' he said.

The crowd parted for them and Harry heard someone say, 'It's a shame. What a terrible shame!'

'Paddy's dead!' The kid clutched the Necroscope's elbow as they turned the corner into a narrow, deserted street.

Dead? Yes, he was, but… did he really have to be? You don't have to be, do you, Paddy?

The deadspeak answer which came back wasn't quite a bark and it wasn't quite a word — but it was an agreement. A dog will usually agree with his friends, and rarely if ever disagree with his master. While Harry wasn't Paddy's beloved master, he certainly was a new friend.

And the decision was made as quickly as that.

Before they reached the small garden in front of number seven, Harry looked down at the lad and said: 'What's your name, son?'

'Peter.' The other could scarcely get it out past his tears and the lump in his throat.

'Peter, I — ' Harry jerked to a halt. Play-acting for all he was worth, he glanced at the pet in his arms. ' — I think I felt him move!'

The boy's mouth fell open. 'Paddy moved? But he's so bad hurt!'

'Son, I'm a vet,' Harry lied. 'Maybe I can save him. You run quickly now and tell your people what's happened, and I'll take Paddy to the surgery. And whatever happens, I'll be in touch just as soon as I know how bad he is — or how good. OK?'

'But — '

'Don't waste time, Peter,' Harry urged. 'It's Paddy's life, right?'

The other gulped, nodded once, flew to the gate of number seven and through it, and as he vanished pell-mell into the garden Harry conjured a Möbius door. By the time Peter's Ma came out of the house wringing her hands — came flying to see the vet — Harry was at a different address entirely…

The Necroscope had perhaps too few friends among the living, but one of them was an old potter up in the Pentlands who fired his own kilns. Paddy was absolutely dead, no doubt about that, when Harry handed him over to Hamish McCulloch for calcination in one of his ovens. 'It's worth a twenty to me, Hamish,' he told the old Scot, 'if you can bring him down to ashes. Well, if not to me, to his master, a young lad with a broken heart. And I'll pay you for one of your pots, too, to keep him in.'

'I reckon we can manage that, Harry.' Hamish nodded.

'Only one thing,' said the Necroscope, 'be careful how you gather him up. I mean, the young lad wants to know he has all of him, right?'

'Just as you say.' Another nod. And Harry waited for five hours until the job was done, but stayed calm and patient and controlled throughout. For now he was the old Harry who, while he had little enough time left of his own, nevertheless had all the time in the world for this.

And anyway it would serve his wider purposes too, wouldn't it? A little preview of what was to come? A chance to observe any possible… discrepancies? For Trevor Jordan's brain had also been shattered, and Penny's flesh had been torn.

At 10:00 p.m. Harry was down in the spacious, dusty cellar of his old house a mile or so out of Bonnyrig. He'd cleaned the place out as best he could and scrubbed an area in the centre of the stone floor until it was smooth as glass. Old Hamish had told him the weight of the dead pup's body before calcination, so that even if Harry's grasp of maths had been meagre it wouldn't be too difficult to calculate pound for pound the various amounts of chemicals required. His knowledge was anything but meagre and he'd calculated it down into grams.

Finally ashes and chemicals were poured together, making a very small mound in the scrubbed floor space, and Harry was ready. And this time there was no pausing to check if his own personal mind-flea was up and jumping, for this time he wasn't worried for himself but for a little kid who wouldn't be sleeping easy tonight.

Except now that he was ready it all seemed so ridiculously easy. Was this all there was to it? Had he perhaps forgotten something? Had those weirdly esoteric words he'd uttered down in the bowels of Janos Ferenczy's ruined castle — that formula out of hideous aeons — really sufficed to bring about… resurrection? And if so, had it been an act of blasphemy? On the other hand, where was the profit in worrying about that now? If the Necroscope was to be damned for his works then he was already damned. And purgatory has to be something like infinity: if you're to suffer for all eternity, there's no way you can be made to suffer twice as long. Is there?

As always his arguments went in a circle, making his head spin. But suddenly he 'knew' that it was the vampire in him, working to confuse him, and in that same moment he acted and so broke the thread. Directing a rigid finger and his thoughts at the pile of ingredients, he spoke the words of evocation:

'Y'ai 'Ng'ngah,

Yog-Sothoth

H'ee-L'geb,

F'ai Throdog

— Uaaahr

It was like putting a lighted match to a pile of incendiary materials: there was phosphorescent light, coloured smoke, a not-quite-sulphur stench. And there was a yelp!

Paddy, called up from his ashes, came staggering from a mushrooming smoke-ring of rapidly dispersing gas or vapour. His ears and stump of a tail were down, trembling, and he wobbled on legs of jelly which seemed incapable of supporting him. He had returned from death and weightlessness — from incorporeity — to life and substantiality in a moment, but his pup's legs were already unused to it.

'Paddy,' the Necroscope whispered, going down on one knee. 'Paddy — here, boy!' And the little dog fell down, stood up, shook himself so as almost to fall again, and came to him.

Black and white, short in the leg, floppy-eared, a mongrel entirely — and entirely alive!

… Was he?

Paddy, the Necroscope spoke again, this time in deadspeak. But there was no answer.

Paddy lived. Truly.

Half an hour later Harry delivered Paddy to house number seven of a row of neat terraced houses in Bonnyrig. He didn't mean to stay, would escape immediately if he could, but there were things he needed to know. About Paddy. About Paddy's character. Was he the same dog exactly?

And apparently he was. Certainly Peter thought so. Paddy's master had been ready for bed for an hour, but he wouldn't go until he'd heard from his 'vet'. And Paddy's return was a miracle to him, though only the Necroscope knew how much of a miracle.

Peter's father was a tall, thin, callused man, but a kind one. 'The boy told us he thought Paddy must be dead,' he said, pouring Harry a liberal whisky, after Peter and his pup had disappeared for the night. 'Broken bones, blood and brains from his ear, a spine all out of joint — it had us worried. He loves that pup.'

'It looked a lot worse than it was,' Harry answered. 'The pup was unconscious, which made his limbs flop; there was some blood from a few scratches, and that always looks bad; and he'd coughed up some slaver. Shock, mostly.'

'And his shoulders?' The other raised an eyebrow. 'Peter said they weren't working, that they were definitely broken.'

'Dislocated.' Harry nodded. 'Once we fixed that everything else came right.'

'We're grateful to you.'

That's OK.'

'What do we owe you?'

'Nothing.'

That's very kind of you…'

'I just wanted to be sure that Paddy was the same dog,' said the Necroscope. 'I mean, that the bump he took hadn't changed his personality. Did he seem the same to you?'

There came a yelp and a bark, and laughter from Peter's bedroom.

'Playing.' The boy's mother nodded, and smiled under-standingly. They shouldn't be, but tonight's special. Oh, yes, Mr…?'

'Keogh,' said Harry.

'Oh, yes, Paddy's just the same.'

Peter's father saw Harry to the garden gate, thanked him again and said goodnight. When he went back inside his wife said: 'What an uncommonly decent, nice person. His eyes, so soulful!'

'Hmm?' Her husband was thoughtful.

'Didn't you think so?'

'Oh, aye, certainly. But — '

'But? Didn't you like him, then? Is there something you can't trust in a man who won't accept payment for a job well done?'

'No, no, it's not that! But, his eyes…'

'Soulful, weren't they?'

'Were they? Down at the garden gate, in the darkness, when he looked at me — '

'Yes?'

But: 'Nothing,' said Peter's father, shaking his head. 'A trick of the light, that's all…'

Back home Harry felt good. Better than at any time since Greece, when he'd got his deadspeak and numeracy back. Maybe he could feel even better, and cause others to feel better, too.

In his study he sat in an easy chair and talked to an urn where it stood shadowed in one corner of the room. Or it would appear that he talked to an urn, but urns don't talk back: Trevor, you were a telepath and a good one. Which means that you still are. So I know that even when I don't speak to you, still you're listening to me. You listen to my thoughts. So… you know what I did tonight, right?'

I can't help what I am, Harry, Trevor Jordan answered, his deadspeak voice 'breathless' with excitement. No more than you can. Yes, I know what you did — and what you're planning to do. I can't believe it yet, and don't suppose 1 will for quite some little time after it has happened, if it happens. It's like a wonderful dream that I don't want to wake up from. Except there's a chance it will be even more wonderful when I do wake up. There was no hope, none, and now there is…

'But surely you knew my intention all along?'

Knowing what someone wants to do doesn't make them capable of doing it, the other answered. But now, after the dog…

Harry nodded. 'But a dog's a dog, and a man's a man. We still can't be sure until… we're sure.'

Do I have anything to lose?

'I suppose not.'

Harry, any time you're ready, then so am I. Boy, am I ready!

Trevor, just a second ago you said you can't help being what you are any more than I can. Did that mean more than it sounded? You must have read quite a lot, in my mind.'

And after a long pause: I won't lie to you, Harry. I know what's happened to you, what you're becoming. You don't know how sorry 1 am.

'Pretty soon,' said the Necroscope, 'the whole damn rat pack will be after me.'

I know. And I know what you'll do then, and where you'll go.

Again Harry's nod. 'But it's like my Ma told me,' he said. 'It's a strange and sinister place. Any help I can get, I'll probably need it.'

Is there something I can do? Not much, I reckon. Not from where I am right now.

'Actually, yes,' said Harry. 'We could do it right now. But I won't take that sort of advantage. If the thing works, that will be soon enough. And even then — especially then — the decision will still be yours.'

So… when? (Again Jordan's breathlessness.)

Tomorrow.'

Jesus!

But: 'Don't!' the Necroscope cautioned him then. 'Curse all you want, but be careful who you name…'

After that they talked generally and remembered old times. A pity there wasn't anything good to remember. Oh, good had come out of it, but it had been evil as Hell at the time.

And after a lull in their deadspeak conversation: Harry, you know that Paxton's still watching you, don't you? It was Jordan who had first brought the mindspy to the Necroscope's attention. Harry remembered that with gratitude. But ever since the initial warning a week ago, it had been his own intuition which alerted him to the telepath's proximity.

His first instinctive reaction to the problem had been to invoke a talent he'd inherited from Harold Wellesley, an ex-boss of E-Branch who had suicided after being found out as a double-agent. Wellesley's talent had been a negative sort of thing: his mind had been better than the vaults of a bank, literally impregnable. But it had seemed to make him the ideal candidate for head of the British mindspy security organization. Had seemed to, anyway. By way of atonement, he'd passed on his talent to Harry.

But Wellesley's talent was sometimes a two-edged sword: if you bolt your doors against your enemies, your friends get locked out, too. Also, when you blow out the candle in a deep cave, everyone goes blind. Harry would prefer the light, prefer to know Paxton was there and what he was about.

And in any case it was draining to have to keep his guard up like that. Power, all power, has to be generated somewhere, and with the Necroscope's constantly increasing emotional stress his batteries were already sufficiently drained.

Now it was the business of Harry's intuition to keep tabs on the mindspy, his intuition and the expanding intelligence of the thing inside him, its waxing talents. Eventually these would develop into a sort of telepathy in their own right — into telepathy and other forms of ESP — but it could do no harm to have Jordan's brand of the art as an 'optional extra'.

Jordan heard that, too.

Harry, there's no sweat on that. I know you're different. Anything I can give you, take it. Now or after you … try it out on me, it makes no difference. I'm not going to change my mind. You'll use it to protect yourself, of course you will, but not to hurt us, I'm sure.

'Us?'

People, Harry. I don't think you could hurt people.

'I wish I could be so sure. But the thing is, it won't be me. Or it will be, but I won't think the same any more.'

So all you have to do is stick to your plan. When you know it's coming — or when circumstances force you to take defensive or evasive action — that's when you get the hell out of it.

'Chased out of my own world!' the Necroscope growled.

That or let the genie out of its bottle, yes.

'You're a straight talker, Trevor.'

Isn't that what friends are for?

'But in a way you're a kind of genie in a bottle yourself, right?' Harry's contrary Wamphyri side was surfacing, his need to argue the point. Any point. Jordan hadn't sensed it yet, but in any case he was trying to keep the conversation light.

Maybe that's where those old Moslem legends spring from, eh? A man with the Power, who knows the magic words, calling up a powerful slave from dust in a bottle. What is your wish, O Master?

'My wish?' Harry's voice was gaunt as his face. 'Sometimes I wish to fuck I'd never been born!'

And now Jordan sensed it: Harry's duality — the strange tides in his blood, eroding the coastline of his will — the horror which challenged his human ascendancy even now, whose challenge was strengthening hour by hour, day by day.

You're tired, Harry. Maybe you should take it easy for a while. Get some sleep.

'At night?' The Necroscope chuckled, but drily, darkly. 'It's not my nature, Trevor.'

You have to fight it.

'I've been fighting it!' Harry's growl was deeper. 'All I do is fight it.'

Jordan was silent for a moment. Then: Maybe… Maybe we should give it a break now. His deadspeak was full of trembling. Harry could feel his fear, the terror of a dead man. And to his innermost self, where Jordan couldn't reach:

Oh, God! Even the dead are afraid of me now.

He stood up abruptly, starting to his feet so as almost to topple his chair. And lurching to the curtains he looked out through an inch of space where the drapes came together, across the river and into the night. At which precise moment, on the far river bank and under the trees there, someone struck a match to light a cigarette. Just for a second Harry saw the flare before it was cupped in the windshield of a hand. And then there was only a yellow glow, brightening when the watcher took a deep drag.

The bastard's out there right now,' Harry spoke, almost to himself.

It might as well be to himself, for Jordan was too frightened to answer…

5 The Resurrected

At midnight Harry was still seething.

He invoked Wellesley's talent, crept out into his garden and down the path to where the old gate in the wall sagged on its rusting hinges. The night was his friend and like a cat he became one with the shadows, until it would seem there was no one there at all. Looking through the gapped gate, across the river, his night-sensitive eyes could plainly see the motionless figure under the trees: the mind-flea, Paxton.

'Paxton…'

The word was like poison on Harry's lips and in his mind… his mind, or that of the creature which was now a growing part of him. For Harry's vampire recognized the threat even as did the Necroscope himself, except it might deal with it differently. If he would let it.

'Paxton.' He breathed the name into the cool night air, and his breath was a mist that drifted to the path and swirled around his ankles. The dark essence of Wamphyri was strong in him now, almost overpowering. 'You can't hear me, you bastard, can you?' He breathed mist which flowed under the gate, across the overgrown river path, down among the brambles and on to the glassy water itself. 'You can't read me; you don't know I'm here at all, do you?'

But suddenly, coming from nowhere, there was a gurgling, monstrous voice — unmistakably that of Faéthor Ferenczy — in Harry's mind: Instead of shrinking back when you sense him near, seek him out! He would enter your mind? Enter his! He will expect you to be afraid; be bold! And when he yawns his jaws at you, go in through them, for he's softer on the inside!

A nightmare voice, but one which Harry himself had drawn from memory. For Wellesley's talent made any other sort of intrusion impossible; Faéthor was gone now where no man could ever reach him; he was lost for ever in future time.

That father of vampires had been talking about his bloodson Janos, but it seemed to the Necroscope that the same techniques might well apply right here, right now. Or perhaps it didn't seem so to Harry, but to the thing inside him. Paxton was here to prove Harry was a vampire. Since he was a vampire, there seemed no way he could disprove it. But must he simply sit still and wait for the consequences of this flea's reports? The urge was on him to even the score a little, to give the mindspy something to think about.

Not actually to 'scratch' his itch, no, for that would be conclusive proof in itself and could only drag the Necroscope further into an already unwelcome light, ultimately to the minute scrutiny of bigger fleas, whose bite might even prove fatal. Also (Harry was obliged to forcibly remind himself) it would be murder.

The thought of that evoked visions of blood, and the thought of that was something he must put aside entirely!

He stepped back from the gate in the old stone wall, conjured a door and passed through it into the Möbius Continuum… and out again onto a second-class road where it paralleled the river on its far side. There was no one in sight; the sky was clouded over; down through the flanking trees the river was seen as a ribbon of lead carelessly let fall in the darkness.

A car, Paxton's car, stood half-on, half-off the road under overhanging branches. A recent model and expensive, its paintwork gleamed in the dark; its doors were locked, windows wound up tight. It pointed slightly downhill, towards a walled bend where the access road joined the main road into Bonnyrig.

Harry stepped from the potholed tarmac, past the car and into the cover of the trees, and where he went the mist followed. No, it didn't simply follow, for he was the source and the catalyst. It boiled up from the ground where he walked, fell from his dark clothes like weird evaporation, poured from his mouth as breath. He went silently, flowingly, unaware of his own feet unerringly seeking soft ground, stepping between the places where brittle, betraying twigs lay in wait for him. And he felt his tenant flexing its muscles and securing its hooks more deeply in his will.

It would be a fine test of the thing's power over him, to take control here and now, causing him to do that from which there could be no return.

Until now Harry's fever had been more or less controlled. His angers had been more violent, true, his depressions deeper and his snatches of joy poignant, but on the whole he had felt no real craving or compulsion, or at least nothing he couldn't fight. But now he felt it. It was as if Paxton had become the centre of all that was wrong with his life, a point he could focus upon, a large wen on the already imperfect complexion of existence.

Some surgery was required.

Harry's mist crept ahead of him. It sprang up from the bank of the river and the boles of trees where they joined the damp earth, and cast swirling tendrils about Paxton's feet. The telepath sat on a tree stump close to the river's rim, his gaze fixed firmly on the dark shape of the house across the water, where light spilled out from an upstairs window. Harry had left that light on, deliberately.

But while the Necroscope was unaware of it, still there was a half-scowl, half-frown on Paxton's face; for the mindspy had lost his quarry's aura. He supposed that Harry was still in the house, but for all his mental concentration he no longer had contact with him. Not even the tenuous contact which was his minimum requirement.

It didn't mean a great deal, of course not, because Paxton was well aware of Harry's talents: the Necroscope could be literally anywhere. Or on the other hand it could mean quite a bit. It isn't everyone who will just go flitting off in the midnight hour, putting himself beyond the reach of men and mentalists alike. Keogh could be up to almost anything.

Paxton shivered as a ghost stepped on his grave. Only an old saying, that, of course; but for a moment just then he'd felt something touch him, like an unseen presence come drifting across the water to stand beside him in the silence of the mist-shrouded river bank. Mist-shrouded? Where in hell had that sprung from?

He stood up, looked to left and right and began to turn around. And Harry, not five paces away, stepped silently into darkness. Paxton turned through a full, slow circle, shivered again and shrugged uncomfortably, and continued to stare at the house across the river. He reached inside his coat and brought out a leather-jacketed flask, tilted it and let strong liquor gurgle into his throat in a long pull.

Watching the esper empty the flask, Harry could feel something dark swelling inside him. It was big, maybe even bigger than he was. He flowed forward, came to a halt directly behind the unsuspecting telepath. What a joke it would be, to let go of Wellesley's shield right now and deliberately aim his thoughts into the back of Paxton's head! Why, the esper would probably leap straight into the river!

Or perhaps he'd just turn round again, very slowly, and see Harry standing there looking right at him, into him, into his quivering, quaking soul. And then, if he went to scream…

The dark, alien, hate-swollen thing was in Harry's hands now, lifting them towards the back of Paxton's neck. It was in his heart, too, and his eyes, and his face. He could feel it pulling back his lips from drooling teeth. It would be so easy to sweep Paxton up and into the Möbius Continuum, and… and deal with him there. There, where no one would ever find him.

Harry's hands only had to close now and he could wring the esper's neck as if he were a chicken. Ahhh!

The thing inside sang of emotions as yet unattained, which could be his. He thrilled to its message, to the ringing cry which echoed through his innermost being even now: Wamphyri! Warn -

- And Paxton hitched back the sleeve of his overcoat and glanced at his watch.

That was all: his movement had been such a natural thing, so mundane, so much of this world, that the spell of an alien plane of existence was broken. And Harry felt like a twelve-year-old boy again, masturbating furiously over the toilet bowl and ready to come, and his uncle had just knocked on the bathroom door.

He drew back from Paxton, conjured a Möbius door and almost toppled through it. Too late (and mercifully so), the mindspy sensed something and whirled about -

— And saw nothing there but a swirl of fog.

Drenched in his own pungent sweat, the Necroscope vacated the Möbius Continuum into the back seat of Paxton's car. And he sat there shuddering, retching and being physically ill on to the floor until he'd sicked the thing right out of himself. At last, looking at the stinking mess of his own vomit, his anger gradually returned. But now he was mainly angry with himself.

He'd set out to teach the esper a lesson and had almost killed him. It said a hell of a lot for his control over the thing inside him, which as yet was… what? A baby? An infant? What hope would he have later, then, when the thing was full-fledged?

And still Paxton was there under the trees by the river bank, there with his thoughts and his cigarettes and whisky. And he'd probably be there tomorrow, too, and the day after that. Until Harry made a mistake and gave himself away. If he hadn't done so already.

'Fuck him!' Harry said out loud, bitterly.

Yes, screw him, shaft the bastard! Which had to be better than murdering him, at least.

He climbed over into the front seat of the car and took off the brake, and felt the wheels slowly turn as she began to roll. He guided the car fully on to the road and let gravity take her along. Rolling down the gentle gradient, the vehicle gained momentum.

Harry pumped at the accelerator until he could smell the heavy petrol fumes, pulled out the choke and pumped some more. A quarter-mile later he was still pumping and the car was doing maybe twenty-five, thirty. The curve was corning up fast, with its grass verge and high stone wall. Harry let go the wheel, conjured a Möbius door out of the seat beside him and slid over into it.

And two seconds later Paxton's car mounted the verge, hit the wall and went off like a bomb!

Just that moment returning from the river to the road, the esper stared uncomprehendingly at the spot where his car had stood — then heard the explosion farther down the road and saw a ball of fire rising into the night. And: 'What…?' he said. 'What?'

By then Harry was home again, dialling 999. He got an emergency operator in Bonnyrig who put him through to the police station.

'Police — how can we help ye?' The voice was heavily accented.

There's a car just burst into flames on the access road to the old estate behind Bonnyrig,' Harry said, breathlessly, and passed on full details of the location. 'And there's a man there drinking from a hip flask and warming his hands on the fire.'

'Who's speaking, please?' The voice was more authoritative now, alert and very official-sounding.

'Can't stop,' said Harry. 'Have to see if anyone's hurt.' He put the phone down.

From his upstairs bedroom window the Necroscope watched the fire steadily brightening, and ten minutes later saw the Bonnyrig fire-engine arrive along with its police escort. And for a little while there was the eerie wailing of sirens where blue-and orange-flashing lights clustered around the central leap of flames. Then the fire winked out and the sirens were silenced, and a little after that the police car drove off… with a passenger.

Harry would have been happy to know that the passenger was Paxton, furiously swearing his innocence and breathing whisky fumes all over the hard-faced officers. But he didn't because by then he was fast alseep. Whether sleep at night was right or wrong for his character made no difference: Trevor Jordan's advice had been sound…

In the morning the rising sun scorched Harry from his bed. Coming up beyond the river, it crept in through his window and seared a path across a twitching left hand which he dreamed was trapped in one of Hamish McCulloch's kilns. Starting awake, he saw the room flooded with glowing yellow sunlight where he'd mistakenly left the curtains open.

He breakfasted on coffee — just coffee — and immediately proceeded to the cool cellar. He didn't know how long he had left, so it might well be a case of now or never. And anyway he'd promised Trevor Jordan it would be today. Jordan's and Penny's urns were already down below, along with the chemicals Harry had taken from the Castle Ferenczy.

Trevor,' he said as he weighed and mixed powders. 'I went after Paxton last night… no, not seriously, but almost. All I did in the end was toss a spanner in his works, which should keep him out of our hair a while. I certainly don't feel him near, but that could be because it's morning and the sun is up. Can you tell me if he's out there?'

The newsagent in Bonnyrig has just opened his shop and there's a milkman doing his rounds, Jordan answered. Oh, and a lot of perfectly ordinary people in the village are having breakfast. But no sign of Paxton. It seems a pretty normal sort of morning to me.

'Not exactly normal,' Harry told him. 'Not for you, anyway.'

I've been trying not to hope too hard, Jordan answered, his deadspeak shivery. Trying not to pray. I still keep thinking I'm dreaming. I mean, we actually do shut down and sleep sometimes. Did you know that?

The Necroscope nodded, finished with his powders and took up Jordan's urn. 'I was incorporeal myself one time, remember? I used to get tired as hell. Mental exhaustion is far worse than physical.'

For a while, as he carefully poured Jordan's ashes, there was silence. Then: Harry, I'm too scared to talk!

'Scared?' Harry repeated the word almost automatically, concentrated on breaking the urn with a hammer and lying its pieces with the insides uppermost around the heap of mortal remains and chemical catalysts, so that anything clinging to them would get caught up in it when he spoke the words.

Scared, excited, you name it… but if I had guts I'd throw them up, I'm sure!

It was time. Trevor, you have to understand that if you're not right… I mean — '

I know what you mean. I know.

'OK.' Harry nodded, and moistened his dry lips. 'So here we go.'

The words of evocation came as easy as his mother tongue, and yet with a growl which denied his human heritage. He used his art with — pride? Certainly in the knowledge that it was a very uncommon thing, and that he was a most uncommon creature.

'Uaaah!' The final exclamation wasn't quite a snarl — and it was answered a moment later by a cry almost of agony!

The Necroscope stepped back as swirling purple smoke filled the cellar, stinging his eyes. It gouted, mushroomed, spilled from or was residue of the chemical materia. It was the very essence of jinni: its massive volume spilling from such a small source. And staggering forward out of it, crying out the pain of his rebirth, came the naked figure of Trevor Jordan. But the Necroscope was ready, in case this birth must be aborted.

For a moment Harry could see very little in the swirl of chemical smoke, and for another only a glimpse: a wild, staring eye, a twisted, gaping mouth, head only partly visible. Only partly there?

Jordan's arms were reaching for Harry, his hands shuddering, almost vibrating. His legs gave way and he fell to one knee. Harry felt the chill of absolute horror and the words of devolution sprang into his mind, were ready on his desiccated lips. Then -

— The smoke cleared and it was… Trevor Jordan kneeling there.

Perfect!

Harry sank to his knees and embraced him, both of them crying like children…

Then it was Penny's turn. She, too, thought she was dreaming, couldn't believe what the Necroscope told her with his deadspeak. But it was one dream from which he soon awakened her.

She fell into his arms crying, and he carried her up out of the cellar to his bedroom, laid her between the sheets and told her to try to sleep. All useless: there was a maniac in the house, running wild, laughing and crying at the same time. Trevor Jordan came and went, slamming doors, rushing here and there — pausing to touch himself, to touch Harry, Penny — and then laughing again. Laughing like crazy, like mad. Mad to be alive!

Penny, too, once the truth sank in, once she believed. And for an hour, two hours, it was bedlam. Stay in bed? She dressed herself in Harry's pyjamas and one of his shirts, and… danced! She pirouetted, waltzed, jived; Harry was glad he had no neighbours.

Eventually they wore themselves out, almost wore the Necroscope out, too.

He made plenty of coffee for them. They were thirsty; they were hungry; they invaded his kitchen. They ate… everything! Now and then Jordan would leap to his feet, hug Harry until he thought his ribs must crack, rush into the garden and feel the sunshine, and rush back again. And Penny would burst into a fresh bout of tears and kiss him. It made him feel good. And it disturbed him. Even now their emotions were no match for his.

Then it was afternoon, and Harry said: 'Penny, I think you can go home now.'

He had told her what she must say: how it couldn't have been her body the police found but someone who looked a lot like her. How she had suffered amnesia or something and didn't know where she'd been until she found herself in her own street in her own North Yorkshire village. That was all, no elaboration. And no mention, not even a whisper, of Harry Keogh, Necroscope.

He made a note of her sizes, Möbius-tripped into Edinburgh and bought her clothes, waited while she frantically dressed herself. He had forgotten shoes: no matter, she'd go barefoot. She would go naked, if that were the only way!

He took her home — almost all the way, only breaking the jump for a final word of warning on the rolling moors — via the Möbius Continuum, which was something else for her not to believe in. And he cautioned her: 'Penny, from now on things will be normal for you, and eventually you may even come to believe this story we've concocted for you. Better for you, me, everyone, if you do believe it. Most certainly better for me.'

'But… I'll see you again?' (The realization of what she had found, and what she must lose. And for the first time the question: did she have the better of the bargain?)

He shook his head. 'People will come and go, Penny, through all your life. It's the way it is.'

'And through death?'

'You've promised me you'll forget that. It isn't part of our story, right?'

And then the rest of the jump, to a street corner she'd known all her life. 'Goodbye, Penny.'

And when she looked around…

As a small child she'd followed the rerun adventures of the Lone Ranger. Who was that invisible man…?

Back at the house near Bonnyrig, Jordan was waiting. He was calmer now but still radiated awe and wonder, which made him look beautiful, fresh-scrubbed, newly returned from a holiday in the sun or a swim in a mountain stream. All of these things. 'Harry, I'm ready any time you are. Just tell me what I must do.'

'You, nothing. Just don't shut me out, that's all. I want to get into your mind, and learn from it.'

'Like Janos did?'

Harry shook his head. 'Unlike Janos. I didn't bring you back to hurt you. I didn't even bring you back for me. It's still up to you. If you don't like the idea of me going in there just say so. This has to be of your own free will.' Very significant words.

Jordan looked at him. 'You didn't just save my life,' he said, 'but returned it to me! Anything you want, Harry.'

The Necroscope sent his developing Wamphyri thoughts directly into Jordan's head, and the other cleared the way for him, drew him in. Harry found what he wanted: it was so like deadspeak that he knew it at once. The mechanism was easy, a part of the human psyche. Mental in action, it was purely physical in operation, a part of the mind people — most people — haven't learned how to use. Identical twins sometimes have it, because they come from the same egg. But discovering it wasn't the same as making it work.

Harry withdrew, said: 'Your turn.'

For Jordan it was easy. He already was a telepath. He looked inside Harry's mind and found the trigger which the Necroscope had pictured for him. It only required releasing. After that, like a switch, Harry could throw it any time it was required.

And: Try it,' Jordan said, when he'd withdrawn.

Harry pictured Zek Föener, a powerful telepath in her own right, and reached out with his new talent.

He (no, she) was swimming in the blue warm waters of the Mediterranean, spear-fishing off Zakinthos where she lived with her husband Jazz Simmons. She was twenty feet down and had lined up a fish in her sights, a fine red mullet where it finned on the sandy bottom and ogled her.

Testing… testing… testing,' said Harry, with more than a hint of dry humour.

She sucked in salt water down the tube of her snorkel, triggered off her spear and missed, dropped her gun and kicked frantically for the surface. And she trod water there, coughing and spluttering, staring wildly all about. Until suddenly it came to her that the words could only have been in her head. But the mental voice had been unmistakable.

Finally she had her breath back, and got her thoughts together. Ha — Ha — Harry?

And from his house in Bonnyrig, fifteen hundred miles away: The one and only,' he answered.

Harry, you… you… a telepath? Her confusion was total.

'I didn't mean to startle you, Zek. Just wanted to find out how good I am.'

Well, you're good! I might have… I might have drowned! A swimmer like Zek? There was no way she might have drowned. But suddenly she backed off, and the Necroscope knew that she'd sensed the other thing that was Harry Keogh. She tried to shut it out of her thoughts but he cut right through her confusion with:

'It's OK, Zek. I know that you know about me. I just think you should also know that it won't be like that with me. I'm not staying here. Not for long, anyway. I have a job to do, and then I'll be on my way.'

Back there? She'd read it in his mind.

To begin with. But there may be other places. You of all people know I can't stay here.'

Harry, she was quick, anxious to return, you know I won't go up against you.

'I know that, Zek.'

She was silent for a long time; then Harry had a thought. 'Zek, if you'll swim back to the beach, there's someone here would like a word with you. But better if you have your feet firmly on the beach, because you won't believe who it is and what he has to say. And this time you really might drown!'

And he was right, she didn't believe it. Not for quite some time…

About the middle of the afternoon, when Jordan had finally accepted everything and the glow had gone off him a little, he said: 'What about me, Harry. Can I just go home?'

'I may have made a mistake,' the Necroscope told him then. 'Darcy Clarke knows I had that girl's ashes. He might figure it out. If he does he'll know I have a couple more talents now. Which will be confirmed — and how — if you show up! And anyway I have this feeling that everything is going to blow up, soon. You can go any time you like, Trevor, but I'd appreciate it if you'd stay here and out of sight a while longer.'

'How long?'

Harry shrugged. 'I have a job to do. That long. Not much more than four or five days, I should think.'

That's OK, Harry,' Jordan nodded. 'I can stand that. Or four or five weeks if I have to!'

'What will you do, anyway? Back to the Branch?'

'It was a good living. It paid the bills. We got things done.'

Then it's best that you leave it until I've gone. You have to know that they'll be coming after me?'

'After all you've done for us. For everybody?'

Again Harry's shrug. 'When an old, faithful dog savages your child, you have him put down. His services in the past don't cut it. What's more, if you knew for certain he was going to savage the child, you'd put him down first, right? And afterwards you might even feel sorry for the old guy and cry a little. But hell, if you also knew he had rabies, why, you wouldn't even think twice! You'd do it for him as much as for anyone else.'

Jordan played it straight, face to face. 'Does it really worry you that much? I mean, let's face it, Harry: it won't be an easy job, taking you out. Janos Ferenczy had a lot going for him, but he wasn't in the same league as you are now!'

'That's why I have to go. If I don't I'll be forced to defend myself, which can only hasten things. And then there'd be a chance for this curse to go on for ever. I didn't spend all that time doing all of that — Dragosani, Thibor, Janos, Faéthor, Yulian Bodescu — just to end up the same way they did.'

'In that case… maybe I should go. I mean now.'

'Oh?'

'I can stay out of sight, keep an eye on them for you. They have Paxton watching you, but they won't know that I'm watching them. They don't even know I'm alive. I mean, they do know I'm dead!'

Harry was interested. 'Go on.'

'Darcy will be the man to watch, not in the office but when he's home. I know where he lives, and I know how he thinks. You'll be on his mind a lot, both ways: because of what you are, but also because he's a good sort of bloke and he'll just be, well, thinking about you. So when everything looks set to go down I'll know it, and then I'll get back to you.'

'You'd do that for me?' Harry knew he would.

'Don't I owe you?'

Harry nodded, slowly. 'It's a good idea,' he finally said. 'OK, go after nightfall. I'll drive you into Edinburgh, and then you're on your own.'

And he did. And then the Necroscope was on his own, too. But not for long.

The next morning Paxton was back.

His presence turned Harry's mood sour in a moment, but he promised himself that later he would turn the tables and take a look inside Paxton's mind for a change. He relished the thought of that. But first he would go and see his Ma and find out if she had anything for him.

The sky was overcast and he stood on the bank of the river with his coat collar turned up against a thin but penetrating, persistent drizzle. 'Any success, Ma?'

Harry? Is that you, son? Her deadspeak was so thin, so far-off sounding, that for a moment the Necroscope thought it was simply background 'static', the whispers of the teeming dead conversing in their graves.

'It's me, Ma, yes. But… you're awfully faint.'

I know, son, she answered from afar. Just like you, I don't have a lot of time now. Not here, anyway. It's all fading now, everything… Did you want something, Harry?

She seemed very weary and wandering. 'Ma,' (he was patient with her, just like in the old days), 'since I've been having some difficulty with the dead, we'd decided that you would help me out and see if they'd be a bit more forthcoming with you… about those poor murdered girls, I mean. You said I should give you a little time, then come and see you again. So here I am. I still need that information, Ma.'

Murdered girls? She repeated him, however vaguely. But then Harry sensed the sudden focusing of her attention as her deadspeak sounded sharper in his unique mind. Of course, those poor murdered girls! Those innocents. Except… well, they weren't all innocents, Harry.

'In my book they were, Ma. For my purposes, they were. But tell me, what do you mean?'

Well, most of them wouldn't speak to me, she answered. It seemed they'd been warned off, warned about you. When it comes to vampires, the dead aren't very forgiving, Harry. The one who would speak to me, she'd been one of the first of his victims — whoever he is — but by no means an innocent. She was a prostitute, son, foul-mouthed and foul-minded. But she was willing to talk about it and said she wouldn't mind talking to you. In fact, she said more than that.

'Oh?'

Yes, she said that it would make a nice change to just… to just talk to a man! Harry's Ma tut-tutted. And so young, so very young.

'Ma,' said Harry, 'I'm going to go and see that one — soon. But you're getting so faint that I don't know if we'll ever get to talk again. So I just thought I'd tell you right now that you've been the best mother anyone could ever have, and…'

— And you've been the best son, Harry, she cut him off. But listen, don't you cry for me. And I promise I won't cry for you. I lived a good life, son, and despite a cruel death I've not been too unhappy in my grave. You were responsible for what happiness I found, Harry, just as you've been for so much of what passes for happiness in this place. That the dead no longer trust you… well, that's their loss.

He blew her a kiss. 'I missed a lot when you were taken from me. But of course, you missed a lot more. I hope there is a place beyond death, Ma, and that you make it there.'

Harry, there's something else. She was fading very quickly now, so that he must give her all of his attention or lose her deadspeak entirely. About August Ferdinand.

'August Ferdi — ? About Möbius?' Harry remembered his last conversation with the great mathematician. 'Ah!' He chewed his lip. 'Well, it could be that I insulted Möbius, Ma… inadvertently, you understand? I mean, I wasn't quite myself that time.'

He said you weren't, son, and that he wouldn't be speaking with you again.

'Oh,' said Harry, a little crestfallen. Möbius had been one of his very best and closest friends. 'I see.'

No, you don't see, Harry, his mother contradicted him. He won't be speaking to you because he won't be there… I mean here. He, too, has somewhere else to go, or believes he has. Anyway, he talked about a lot of things I didn't much understand: space and time, space-time, the cone-shaped universes of light? I think that covers everything. And he said your argument left one big question unanswered.

'Oh?'

Yes. The question of the… ius Continuum itself. He said… thinks… knows what it is. He said… was… mind… She was breaking up, her deadspeak scattering, for the last time, Harry knew.

'Ma?' He was anxious.

Möbius… said… was… The Mind, Harry…

'The Mind? Ma, did you say The Mind?'

She tried to answer but couldn't quite make it. All that came back was the faintest of all far-distant, fading whispers.

Haarrry… Haaarrrry…

Then silence.

Paxton had read the Necroscope's case-files and knew quite a lot about him. Most of it would seem unbelievable, to people of entirely mundane persuasions. But of course Paxton wasn't one of them. On the far bank of the river, he watched Harry through a pair of binoculars and thought: The strange sod's talking to his mother, a woman dead for quarter of a century and long since turned to slop! Jesus! And they say telepathy is weird!

Harry 'heard' him and knew that he'd been eavesdropping on his conversation with his mother; on Harry's part of it, anyway. And suddenly he was furious, but coldly furious, not like the other night. And again Faéthor's words of advice sprang to memory: 'He would enter your mind. Enter his!'

Paxton saw the Necroscope step behind a bush and waited for him to come out on the other side. But he didn't. Taking a leak? the esper wondered.

'Actually, no,' said Harry softly, from directly behind him. 'But when I do I'd like to think it's in private.'

'Who — ?' The mindspy whirled about, stumbled, staggered on the very rim of the river. Harry reached out easily and caught the front of his jacket, steadied him, grinned an utterly mirthless grin at him. He looked him up and down: a small, thin, withered-looking stick of a man in his middle to late twenties, with the face and eyes of a weasel. His telepathy must be Old Ma Nature's way of making up for several sorts of deficiency.

'Paxton,' Harry said, his voice still dangerously soft, a hot breath squeezed out of burning bellows lungs, 'you're a scum-sucking little mind-flea. I reckon that when your father made you the best part leaked from a ruptured rubber down your Ma's leg onto the floor of the brothel. You're a scumbag bastard who has invaded my territory, stepped on my toes and is making me itch. And I have every right to do something about you. Don't you agree?'

Paxton flapped his mouth like a landed fish, finally got his breath and his nerve back. 'I… I'm doing my job, that's all,' he gasped, trying to free himself from Harry's grip. But the Necroscope just held him there at arm's length — held him that much tighter — with no real expenditure of energy at all.

'Doing your job?' He repeated Paxton's words. 'Who for, scumbag?'

'That's none of your busin — ' Paxton started to say.

Harry shook him, glared at him, and for the first time the esper noticed a flush of red light colouring the Necroscope's gaunt cheeks where it escaped from behind the thick lenses of his dark glasses. An angry red light — from his eyes!

'For E-Branch?' Harry's voice was lower still, a rumble, almost a growl.

'Yes — no!' Paxton blurted the words out. Soft as jelly, all he wanted now was to get away from here; to that end he'd say anything at all, the first thing that came to mind. Harry knew it, could read it in his pale face and trembling lips; but where lips may lie the mind usually tells the truth. He went inside, scanned it all and more, and got out again like squelching from the sucking quag of a sewer. Even through the acrid odour of Paxton's fear, still he'd been able to smell the shit.

It was a relief to know that such minds were in the minority; otherwise the Necroscope might be tempted to declare war on the entire human race, right now!

But Paxton knew he'd been in: he'd felt Harry in there, like slivers of ice in his mind. He started imitating a fish again.

'So now you know for sure,' said Harry. 'And now you'll report to your boss. Well, you go and tell the Minister that his worst nightmare has come true, Paxton. Tell him that, and then quit. Get out and stay out. I know you don't warn too easily, but this time take some good advice and run while you can. I won't be warning you again.'

And while that sank in he released the other, released him violently, tossed him back and over the lip of the riverbank, and down into the gently swirling water.

It was only then that the Necroscope saw Paxton's briefcase lying open on a tree stump close by. Several white junk-mail envelopes — and one large manila envelope — were like magnets to his eyes. They were addressed to Harry Keogh, No. 3 The Riverside, etc, etc.

Harry glared once more at the floundering esper where he gagged, gurgled and splashed in the cold river water beyond his reach — for the moment just out of harm's way — then snatched up his mail and took it home with him.

Paxton could swim, which was as well. For the Necroscope didn't much care one way or the other…

6 Red Alert!

Harry flipped quickly through the murder files, discovered the young prostitute's name, home town and place of interment, and made his way at once to her graveside in a small cemetery on the northern outskirts of Newcastle. And the Necroscope had moved so quickly that as he seated himself in the shade of a tree close by Pamela Trotter's simple headstone, so Paxton was still catching his breath where he'd dragged himself up on to the river bank a hundred miles away.

'Pamela,' said the Necroscope, 'I'm Harry Keogh. I believe my mother might have mentioned my name to you.'

Your mother and others, she came back at once. I've been expecting you, Harry — and I've been warned off you, too!

Harry nodded, perhaps ruefully. 'My reputation has suffered a bit lately, it's true.'

Mine suffered a lot, she chuckled. For nearly six years, in fact, ever since I was fourteen and a nice 'uncle' showed me his little pink sprinkler and told me where it went. Actually, I seduced him, for I'd noticed that whenever he was near me he had a hard on. But if it hadn't been him it would have been someone else, because I was just naturally like that. We played around a lot until his old lady caught us at it one day, the jealous old bat! I was going bouncy-bouncy on him when she walked in. He whipped it out but was too far gone and spurted on the carpet. I don't think she'd seen him spurt for a long time, and she'd certainly never had it like that! Come to think of it, I don't think he had either. Not before me. But I liked it all ways. It helps when you enjoy your work.

Harry was silent for a moment, surprised, even a little taken aback. He really didn't know how to answer her.

Didn't your Ma tell you I was a tart, a trollop, a whore? There was no bitterness in her, not even much of sadness, and Harry liked her for it.

'Something like that,' he answered, eventually. 'Not that I think it matters a great deal. There have to be a hell of a lot of you down there by now!'

She laughed and Harry liked her even more. The oldest profession, she said.

'But one night, nearly eight weeks ago, it caught up with you, right?' He felt that with her he could get right to it.

Her assumed indifference fell away from her at once. That wasn't why it happened, she said. I didn't fetch him on. And anyway he didn't want me… like that.

'It was just an assumption,' Harry told her, quickly. 'I meant no offence, and I'm not eager to bring back hurtful memories. But it's hard to see how I can track this bloke down if no one is able to tell me about him.'

Oh, I'd like to see him get his, Harry, she answered. And I'll help you any way I can. I just hope I can remember enough, that's all.

'You won't know until you try.'

Where do you want me to start?

'First show me how you were, or how you thought you were,' he said. For he knew well enough that the dead retain pictures of themselves as they were in life, and he wanted to try and draw some sort of comparison with Penny Sanderson. In short, he wondered if his necromancer quarry followed a pattern.

From her mind he immediately got back a picture of a tall, dark-eyed, leggy brunette in a mini-skirt, with slightly loose breasts unsupported under a blue silk blouse, and a shapely backside. But there was nothing of character in the picture, her picture, nothing to suggest quality of mind or personality; it was all sensual or outright sexual. Which didn't fit with his first impressions.

So? How was I?

'Very attractive,' he told her. 'But I think you're selling yourself short.'

Often, she agreed, but without her customary laugh. Then she sighed, and that was something Harry was used to in the dead. It was the realization of a time and a thing done and finished with, which could never return. But she brightened up at once. And here am I actually talking to a man, and for once not wondering what he's got in his pants. In the front, and in the back-pocket.

'Was it always like that, for money?'

And sometimes for fun. I've told you, I was nympho. Do you want to get on now?

Harry was embarrassed. She'd given him a stock answer, had obviously heard that question before, often. 'Was I prying?'

It's OK, she answered. All men wonder about it, about what goes on in a pro's mind. But suddenly her deadspeak was very cold. All men except that one, anyway. He doesn't have to wonder, for he can always find out for himself, afterwards, when they're dead.

And with that the Necroscope was sure she'd give him all she could. 'Tell me about it,' he said.

And she did…

It was a Friday night and I went to the dance. Being freelance, my time was my own. I didn't need a pimp touting for me, taking my money and bringing his friends round for freebies. But the dance was in town and I lived quite a few miles out. After the midnight hour taxis are expensive; Cinders needed her coach home.

That was OK; there are always a handful of likely lads who'll buzz a girl home on the chance of a grope. And if I liked the guy and if he wasn't too pushy, maybe he could get more than a grope. A ride for a ride, as the saying goes.

On this occasion I picked the wrong one: no, not our man, but an armful all the same. Once I was in the car his polite, concerned attitude went right out the window. He didn't know what I was, thought I was just a straight kid but easy meat. He could hardly drive for drooling and wanted to stop in every layby and back alley. I was wearing expensive clothes and didn't want them ripped up. And anyway I didn't like him.

He said he knew a place just off the motorway, and before I could tell him I didn't need it he took the fly-on for Edinburgh. In a layby under some trees he made his move, and got my knee in his soft bits for his trouble! When he could drive again he did, but left me stranded there.

There was a service station a quarter-mile up the motorway. I went there and had a coffee. I wasn't shaken up or anything, just dehydrated. Too many gin-and-its at the Palace.

But sitting there in this little booth I was joined by a driver. That was how I saw him: a driver. A long-distance man shaking off his weariness with a mug of coffee.

Don't ask me what he looked like; the place was three-quarters empty and they'd turned the lights low to keep the bills down, and there was still a lot of gin in me. I spoke to him but I didn't really look at him, you know? Anyway, he didn't seem a bad sort and he wasn't pushy. When he finished his coffee and made to stand up, I asked him which way he was heading.

'Where do you want to go?' he said. His voice was soft, not unfriendly.

I told him where I lived and he said he knew it. 'Your luck's in,' he told me. 'I go past it on the motorway. About five miles from here? There's a flyoff where I can drop you. A couple of hundred yards and you'll be at your door. Can't take you any closer than that, I'm afraid, because my miles and fuel are monitored. Anyway, it's up to you. Maybe you'd feel safer calling a taxi?'

But I wasn't one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

We left the cafeteria and went out into the lorry park. He was cool and calm, in no hurry. I felt perfectly safe with him. In fact I didn't give it a thought. His vehicle was one of these big articulated jobs, which we approached from the side and the rear. The headlights of a passing car as it flashed by on the motorway lit it up in a swath of light. The lorry had ice-blue panels with white lettering saying: frigis express. I remember it well because the white paint had peeled off one leg of the 'X' making it look like eypress.

But at the back of the lorry my driver paused and looked at me, and said: 'I just have to make sure this door is secure.'

I stood beside him as he unlocked and slid up this roller door across the full width of the truck. A blast of ice-cold air came out, which made me shiver as it turned to a cloud of mist. Inside… there seemed to be rows of things hanging in there, but it was dark and I couldn't see what they were. He reached inside with both hands and did something, then looked over his shoulder and said, 'It's OK.' And I think it was then I realized that I hadn't seen him smile. Not once.

He indicated we should go to the cab, and as he started to pull the door down again I turned away from him. That was when he grabbed me from behind. One arm went round my neck and the other hand held something over my face. Of course I gasped for air — and got chloroform!

I kicked and struggled, but that only makes you gasp all the more! And then I passed out…

When I came to I was lying — or slithering about — on a patch of ice: that's what it felt like, anyway. There was a smell but I couldn't quite make out what it was. I was much too cold; all my senses were numb from the cold. And I felt dizzy and nauseous from the chloroform.

Then I remembered everything and knew I was in the back of the truck, slipping and slithering when he applied his brakes or accelerated. And of course I also knew I was in trouble, in fact dead trouble. Whatever my driver wanted, he was going to get it. And then there was a fair chance that he'd kill me. I'd seen his truck; I could more or less describe him, if not now, certainly later; it was odds on I was a goner.

I propped myself in one corner of the dark refrigerator (I suppose that's what it was: a large mobile fridge, a freezer truck) and tried to get some warmth back into my body. I hugged myself, blew on my hands, beat my arms about. But I was weak from the cold and the after-effect of the chloroform. I didn't have the strength of a kitten.

Then, after — oh, I don't know how long, maybe fifteen minutes — there was a bumpy patch and I heard his airbrakes go on. To this day I don't know where we were, for I never did see the outside again. The truck stopped; in a little while the door rolled up and it was dark outside; a dark figure clambered up panting into the rear of the trailer. He pulled the door shut again and put on a dim interior light, just a single bulb under a grille in the ceiling. And then he came for me.

He was wearing a long coat which was all dark-stained leather on the outside and brown fur inside; he took it off as he approached me and threw it down on me. 'Get on it,' he said, panting with some weird emotion. But his voice was just as cold as the place where he planned to have me, which I now saw was a meat safe. Beast carcases, all grey, brown and red, hung from rows of hooks. And the layer of ice on the floor was frozen beast blood.

There… there doesn't have to be any rough stuff,' I told him. 'We can do it just as you say.' And freezing cold though I was I opened my blouse and hitched up my mini to show him my frilly panties.

He looked down on me in that unsmiling way of his, and I saw that his face was all puffy and bloated, and his eyes winking like little lumps of shiny coal in the swollen red mask of his face. 'Just as I say?' He repeated my words.

'Any way at all. And I swear it will be good. Only just don't hurt me. And you can trust me. Afterwards… I won't say a word.' I lied like hell. I wanted to live.

Take 'em off,' he panted. 'Everything.'

God, there was no soul behind his voice, nothing behind his eyes. There was just the steam-heat of his body and the pounding of his feverish blood. I could feel how strong he was, and how weird and different. 'Quickly!' he said, and his voice was a croak and his gorged face was wobbling with strain and horrible excitement.

I had to do what he told me, keep him happy. But I was so cold my fingers wouldn't obey me. I couldn't get my clothes off. He got down on one knee and I could see tools glinting in the loops of his wide leather belt. One of them was a meat-hook, which he took out and showed me!

When I gasped and turned my face away, he tore my jacket right off my back; my blouse, too. Then he put the hook in the top of my skirt and ripped it down through the plastic belt and material, laying it open. He ripped open my panties in the same way. And all I could do was huddle there as cold as one of the dead animals on its hook. And I thought: What if he uses that hook on me? But he didn't. Not the hook.

Then he was tearing his clothes off: not his upper clothes, just his pants. And I knew this was it. But a man as strong and as dangerous as this could hurt me badly. I had to make it as easy for him — as easy for myself — as possible. I opened my legs and stroked my bush of cold hair. And God help me, I tried to smile at him. 'It's all here,' I said, my words turning to snow as they came out. 'All for you.'

'Eh?' he grunted, looking at me, his penis huge and jerking about on its own, with a life of its own. 'All for me? All for Johnny? That?' And then he smiled. And he took up another of his tools.

This one was like a knife, but it was hollow and had been cut from steel tubing about an inch and a half in diameter, cut at an angle, to give it a sharp point. And its edges had been sharpened to razor brightness.

'Oh, God!' I gasped then, for I couldn't hold my terror any longer. And I clutched at myself and tried to cover my nakedness. But my driver, my all-too-soon-to-be murderer, that… that thing, he only laughed. There was no emotion in it, not as I understood emotion, but he laughed anyway.

'Yes, cover yourself,' he gurgled at me, the saliva of his lust overflowing from his wobbling, grimacing mouth. 'Cover it up, girlie. For Johnny doesn't want your ugly little fuckie hole. Johnny makes his own holes!'

He moved closer and his flesh was alive and leaping, bursting for me. And then… and then…

'It's OK.' It was as much as Harry could bear. His voice was trembling, broken. 'I know what then. You've said enough. I… I'll go on what I have.'

Pamela was crying now, spilling out her poor mutilated soul, all of her defiance and resilience crushed and drained from her by the horror of what she'd forced herself to remember for the Necroscope.

He … he made my body ugly! she sobbed. He made holes in me! Before I was dead he was into me. And after I was dead I could still feel him grunting on me, hurting me. It's not right that when you're dead someone should still be able to hurt you, Harry.

'It's OK, it's OK,' was all Harry could say to comfort her. But even saying it he knew it wasn't, knew it wouldn't be until he himself had put this thing right.

She took this from his deadspeak, understood his resolve, reinforced his anger with her own. Get him for me, Harry! Get that dog's bastard for me!

'And for myself,' he told her. 'For if I don't I know he'll always be there, clinging like slime to the walls of my mind. But, Pamela — '

Yes?

'Simply killing this one won't be enough. I mean, it's just not enough! But if you're willing, there's a way you can help me. You're strong, Pamela, in death just as you were in life. And what I have in mind… I believe it's something you would enjoy even more than you did in life.' He explained his meaning, and for a little while she was silent.

Then: I think I know now why the dead are afraid of you, Harry, she said, wonderingly. And: Is it true that you're a vampire?

'Yes… no!' he said. 'Not like that. Not yet, anyway. And not here. But somewhere else I will be — or may be — one day.'

Yes. He sensed her nod. I think you must be — or will be — for nothing human could ever think the thought you thought just then. Nothing entirely human, anyway.

'But you'll do it?'

Oh, yes, she answered him at last with a grim, emphatic deadspeak nod. Who or whatever you are, I'll do anything you tell me, Harry Keogh, vampire, Necroscope. Anything, everything and whatever it takes to get even. Whatever you ask and whenever you ask it. Anything…

Harry nodded. 'So be it,' he said.

For the next thirty-odd hours the Necroscope was busy; not only him but E-Branch, too. And the next day, a warm evening in mid-May, the Minister Responsible caused the Branch emergency call-in system to be brought into play.

First, acting on disturbing information received from Geoffrey Paxton (concerning among other things the files Darcy Clarke had mailed to Harry Keogh), the Minister had relieved Clarke of all duties and placed him under what amounted to house arrest at Clarke's own north London flat in Crouch End. Second, he must now attend the O-group briefing he'd called at E-Branch HQ. The espers would know, of course, that something big was in the offing: all available agents were to be present.

Paxton was there to meet the Minister on the ground floor. Even as they exchanged curt greetings Ben Trask, just back from a job, came in from the street through the swing doors. Trask looked drawn, even haggard. The Minister took him to one side where they conversed in lowered tones for a minute or two, and for once Paxton knew enough to keep his nose out. Then they all three took the elevator upstairs and went directly to the ops room.

The called-in agents were silent, seated, waiting for the Minister. He took the podium and his eyes swept the mainly ordinary-looking faces of the espers — Britain's ESP-endowed mindspies — where they stared back at him. He knew them all from photographs in their files, but only Darcy Clarke and Ben Trask had ever met him. And Paxton, of course.

If Clarke had been here, perhaps he would have stood up as a sign of respect, and maybe the rest of them would have followed suit. Or there again maybe not. The trouble with this lot had always been that they thought they were special. But here the Minister knew he wasn't fooling anybody, least of all himself. They were special, bloody special!

And looking at them he felt as several before him must surely have felt. Physics and metaphysics, robots and romantics, gadgets and ghosts. Two sides of the same coin. Were they really? Science and parapsychology? The mundane and the supernatural? And he wondered what was the difference anyway? Isn't a telephone or radio magic? To speak with someone on the other side of the world, even on the moon? And has there ever been a more powerful, more monstrous spell or invocation than E=mc2?

These were some of the Minister's thoughts as he scanned the faces of E-Branch's espers and put names to them: Ben Trask, the human lie-detector; blocky, overweight, mousey-haired and green-eyed, slope-shouldered and lugubrious. Possibly Trask's sad expression sprang from the knowledge that the whole world was a liar. Or if not all of it, a hell of a lot of it. It was Trask's talent: to recognize whatever was false. Show him or tell him a lie and he would know it at once. He wouldn't always know the truth of the thing, but he would always know when what was represented as true wasn't so. No facade, however cleverly constructed, could ever fool him. The police used him a lot, to crack stone killers; also he came in handy in respect of international negotiations, when it was good to know if the cards on the table made a full deck.

David Chung: a young Londoner, a locator and scryer of the highest quality. He was slight, wiry, slant-eyed and yellow as they come. But he was British, loyal, and his talent was amazing. He tracked Soviet nuclear 'stealth' subs, IRA units in the field, drug-runners. Especially the latter. Chung's parents had been addicts, and their addiction had killed them. That's where his talent had started, and it was still growing.

Anna Marie English was something else. (But weren't they all?) Twenty-three, bespectacled, enervated, pallid and dowdy, she was hardly an English rose! That was a direct result of her talent, for she was 'as one with the Earth': her way of defining it. She felt the rain forests being eaten away; she knew the extent of the ozone holes; when the deserts expanded she felt their desiccation, and the mass erosion of mountain soil made her physically sick. She was 'ecologically aware' beyond the five senses of mundane mankind. Greenpeace could base their entire campaign on her, except no one would believe. The Branch did believe, and used her as it used David Chung: as a tracker. She tracked illicit nuclear waste, monitored pollution, warned of invasions of Colorado beetle and Dutch elm disease, cried aloud the extinction of whales, elephants, dolphins, other species. And she knew that the Earth was sick and growing sicker. She only had to look in the mirror each day to know that.

Then there was Geoffrey Paxton, a telepath, one of several. An unpleasant person, the Minister thought, but his talent was useful. And it takes all sorts to make a world. Paxton was ambitious, he wanted it all. Better to employ him where he too could be watched than have him turn to high-stakes blackmail or become the mindspy agent of some foreign power. Later… Paxton's would be a career worth following. And closely.

Sixteen of them gathered here, under one roof, and eleven more out in various parts of the world, guiding that world, or at least watching over it. They were paid according to their talents, handsomely! And they were worth every penny. It would cost a lot more if they ever decided to work for themselves…

Sixteen of them, and as the Minister's eyes roved over them so they studied him: a man who so far had kept himself to the shadows and would prefer to stay there, except that now some affair of the utmost moment had lured him out. He was in his mid-forties, small and dapper, dark hair brushed back and plastered down. And he had no nerves to speak of, or none that was visible, anyway. He wore patent-leather black shoes, a dark-blue suit and light-blue tie. His brow had a few wrinkles but other than these his face was normally unlined, and his eyes were bright, clear and blue. Right now, though, and especially since his conversation with Ben Trask, he was looking harried.

'Ladies, gentlemen,' (he wasn't one for preamble), 'what I have to say would seem fantastic to almost anyone outside these walls, as would almost everything that goes on within them. But I'll try not to bore you with too many things you already know. Mainly, I've gathered you together to tell you we have one hell of a problem. First I'll tell you how it came to be, and how it came to light. Then you'll have to tell me how we're going to deal with it, in which instance I know that even the least of you — if there is such a thing — has more practical experience than I have. In fact, you're the only people with practical experience of these things, and so the only ones who can deal with the matter in hand.'

He took a deep breath, then continued: 'Some time ago we appointed a traitor as head of E-Branch. I'm talking about Wellesley, yes. Well, he can't do any more harm. But after him it was my job to make sure it couldn't happen again. In short, we needed someone who was capable of spying on the spies. Now, I know you people have an unwritten code: you don't spy on each other. So I couldn't use one of you, not in situ anyway. I had to take one of you out of the Branch and make him responsible to myself alone. And I had to do it before he could build up too many loyalties. So I chose Geoffrey Paxton, a relative newcomer, as my watcher over the watchers.'

He at once held up his hands, as if to ward off protests, though none was forthcoming — as yet. 'None of you, and I do mean none of you, was suspect in any way. But after Wellesley I couldn't take any chances. Still, I'd like to have it understood that your personal lives are still yours, and no tampering. Paxton has always been under the strictest instructions not to interfere or pry into anything extraneous, but confine himself solely to Branch business. Which is to say, Branch security.

'A few weeks ago we had some business in the Mediterranean. Two of our members, Layard and Jordan, had come up against… unpleasant opposition. It was the worst sort of business, but not without precedent. The head of E-Branch, Darcy Clarke, went out there with Harry Keogh and Sandra Markham to see what could be done. Later, Trask and Chung joined them, and they also had help from other quarters. As for qualifications: Clarke and Trask both had experience of that sort of thing, and Keogh… well, Keogh is Keogh. If he could be reactivated, get his talents back, that would be a wonderful bonus for the Branch. But initially he went out as an observer and adviser, for no one knew more about vampirism than he did…' (And here he paused, perhaps significantly.)

'Now, we still don't know exactly what happened out there in Rhodes, the Greek islands, Romania, but we do know that we lost Trevor Jordan, Ken Layard and Sandra Markham. I mean lost them dead! So it can be seen they had a real problem, one which Darcy Clarke would have us believe is now… resolved? Harry Keogh, of course, could tell us everything, but so far he's chosen to tell us very little.'

By now the breathing of the Minister's audience was quite audible, perhaps even heavy, impatient; and he saw that someone had stood up. Since the light was on the podium he had to squint to see who it was on his feet back there in the shadows, but in a little while he made it out to be the very tall, skeletally thin hunchman or prognosticator Ian Goodly. 'Yes, Mr Goodly?'

'Minister,' Goodly answered, his high-pitched voice shrill but not unnaturally or unusually so, 'I know you won't be offended by any sort of imagined implication when I say that so far every word you've said has been spoken with absolute honesty and integrity. It came straight from the heart, was told the way you see it and with the best of intentions. I don't think anyone here doubts that, or that it takes a brave sort of man to come in here and try to tell us anything, especially in the knowledge that there are people here who could pick your mind clean in a moment.'

The Minister nodded. 'I don't know about the bravery bit, but everything else is correct. What's more it puts any sort of subterfuge right out of the question; it can be seen — you people can surely see — that I have no axe to grind. So… are you making a point, Mr Goodly?'

The point is that I do have an axe to grind, sir,' Goodly answered, quietly. 'We all do. And the way this briefing is going, it strikes me as likely we could have several axes to grind before you're through. Not with you, you understand. That would be pointless anyway, for my talent tells me that you're going to be our Minister Responsible for a long time to come. So… not with what you've said or what you think, but maybe with what you've done and plan to do. Or plan to ask us to do. Unless, of course, there are some damn good reasons.'

'Do you mind explaining?' The Minister's confusion was mounting. 'But briefly, because I really do have to get on, and-'

'Explanations are easy.' Someone else was on his — no, her — feet: Millicent Cleary, a pretty little telepath whose talent was as yet embryonic. She merely glanced at the Minister but scowled furiously at the back of Paxton's head where he sat in the first row of seats. 'Some explanations, anyway. I mean, it was inevitable we'd be monitored eventually, but… by that?' And still scowling, she tossed her head to give the final word extra emphasis. She was pointing at Paxton.

'Miss, er — ?' In his confusion the Minister had forgotten her name. He prided himself on not forgetting names. He looked at her, looked at Paxton.

'Cleary,' she said. 'Millicent…' And she breathlessly continued: 'Paxton didn't follow your instructions. He simply ignored your orders. Branch security? Branch business? Oh, that was the handy excuse you gave him — which he scarcely needed — but other people's business, more like! And his nose right in it!'

The Minister was frowning. He looked harder at Paxton. 'Can you be more specific, Miss Cleary?'

But she wouldn't. She could but wouldn't. What, and tell everyone here that during Paxton's first month with the Branch she'd caught the shrivelled little scumbag in her mind one night, playing with himself to the purr of her vibrator and the tingling of her senses?

'He looked at all of us.' Someone else saved her, his voice strong and gravelly. 'He looked at the juicy bits, which like it or not we each and every one of us have, and he was doing it before you gave him his brief! Since when, why… by now he's probably looked at your juicy bits, too!'

And back to the gangling Goodly again: 'Minister, if you hadn't taken Paxton out of the organization, we would have. He's about as trustworthy as a defective contraceptive. If AIDS was a psychic disease, all our brains would be shrivelling to shit right now! All of them!'

He paused to let that sink in, and after a moment: 'So it seems to us that what you've done is to take away the one man we all trust, while at the same time giving us a watchdog who snaps at his keepers. Yes, and you've chosen one hell of a time to do it.' That was twice he'd cursed, and it wasn't Goodly's style to swear at all, not even mildly.

Paxton had been cleaning his fingernails, apparently unconcerned, but now his ears reddened up a little. He stood up and turned round, glared at the others where they all stared at him in silent accusation. 'My talent is… unruly!' he snapped. 'Also it's eager, full of all the enthusiasm which you jealous bastards have lost! I'm still finding out about it, still experimenting. It isn't some bloody bonsai tree you can just force into any old shape!'

Almost as one person they shook their heads; they were the last people he should ever try to convince; his pallid, lame excuses wouldn't work on them. Each and every one of them, they had it in for Paxton. Finally Ben Trask spoke up, giving their single unified thought shape and substance. 'You're a liar, Paxton,' he said, quite simply. And because Trask was what he was, he didn't have to enlarge upon his accusation.

The Minister felt as if he'd bumped into a hornets' nest and for his pains (or by them) was being driven off course, which he really couldn't afford to let happen. He held up his hands, took on a harder, more authoritative tone of voice. 'For God's sake, put your feuding and personal feelings aside!' he cried. 'At least for the moment, or for as long as it takes. Whatever else any one of you is or isn't, there's one thing we can at least be sure of: you're all human!'

Which hit them like a truck.

Seeing that he now had their attention, and while he retained the upper hand, the Minister turned pleadingly to Ben Trask. 'Mr Trask — but level-headed, if you please — will you repeat what you told me downstairs?'

Trask looked at him grudgingly but nodded. 'Only first let me finish telling them what you started. They already know most of it and have probably guessed the rest, so I'll get straight to it. And it just might come easier if they hear it from me.'

'Very well,' the Minister replied, sighing his relief.

And Trask began:

'Zek Föener gave us a helping hand in the Greek islands,' he said. 'You'll know who she is from the Keogh files, what happened at Perchorsk and on Starside, etc. She's a powerful telepath, one of the world's best. But like the Necroscope himself she's opted out of cloak and daggery.

'Anyway, it was dodgy out there in the Med. We were killing vampires, and there were plenty of times when they nearly killed us. But Harry took the brunt of it and went up against the Big One, Janos Ferenczy himself — and I know I don't have to tell you about the Ferenczys. When Harry was in Romania that last time, just before the end, Zek tried to get in touch with him to see how things were going. But telepathy over great distances isn't easy and she didn't get too much. At least that's what she told us, but we could see that what she did get shocked her rigid.

'I know Darcy Clarke has been worried stiff about it, for the fact is Darcy thinks the Necroscope's the best thing since sliced bread. I know several of you also think so, and, hell, so do I! Or I used to…

'So… we did the job and came back, and as far as we know Harry was successful, too. It seems he made a great job of it. Except he's been a bit cagey about what actually happened up in the Carpathians. Now me, I haven't read too much into that. Nor has Darcy Clarke. For after all, Harry did lose Sandra Markham out there. So Darcy was going to let him get it off his chest in his own good time.

'For which — or so it would seem — Darcy's been sort of "reduced to the ranks", de-commissioned, bust, etc. But for what, that's what I'd like to know? For inefficiency, in that he maybe didn't want to prejudge an old friend? For holding back awhile and not going off half-cocked? For having — shit — just a little faith!?'

Both the Minister and Paxton opened their mouths as if to butt in, but Trask cut them out with: The thing you have to remember about Darcy Clarke is this: that his talent doesn't go sneaking into other people's minds, eavesdropping or spying from a distance. All it does is look after Darcy. But he's kept in touch with the Necroscope and so far there's nothing to report. Darcy's talent didn't warn him of any immediate danger. If it had… you can bet your life he'd have been the first to yell! The last thing he'd want is for another Yulian Bodescu to be out and about!' 'But — ' Paxton started.

'Shut your face!' Trask told him. 'These people are still listening to someone telling the truth! Only the truth…' And he eventually continued: 'Anyway, that was all yesterday and today is today. And now things seem to have changed…' He paused and looked at the Minister. 'Did you want to take it from there, sir?'

The Minister gave him a grim look and raised an eyebrow. 'But you haven't told it all, Mr Trask.'

Trask gritted his teeth but nodded. And after a moment: 'I'm just back from a job,' he said. 'It's this serial killer thing we've been working on, these brutal, horrific murders of young women. The thing is, Darcy had approached Harry for his help on this one, because… you know… that's what the Necroscope is: the one man in the world who can talk to a victim after she's dead. And Darcy told me how Harry had been especially upset by the death of the latest one, a girl called Penny Sanderson.

'Well, two days ago Penny turned up — like a bad Penny, eh?' But he wasn't grinning. 'Now this girl was dead and gone for ever, and yet suddenly here she is, right as rain, back home with her old folks. And the point is she couldn't even convince them that she hadn't been murdered! They had seen her body; they'd known it was their daughter; they regarded her return as nothing short of a miracle.

The police weren't happy with any of this. Oh, she had a story to tell, but it rang like a cracked bell. And if she really was Penny Sanderson, then who had been cremated? So the Minister sent me up there to sit on a "standard police procedure interview". Of course, I was their lie-detector.

'Well, she was — is — Penny Sanderson; she wasn't lying about that. But she was lying about her loss of memory and what all. So knowing the Keogh connection, I just sort of thought to ask her if she knew him: had she ever heard of him or met him? And she said no, never, and just looked blank. A bare-faced lie! Which led to my next question, except I didn't frame it like a question. I simply shrugged and said: "You're a lucky girl. It might easily have been you who was dead and not your double."

'And she looked me straight in the eye and said: "I'm sorry for her, whoever she was, but she had nothing to do with me. I didn't die." And again she was lying through her teeth. Well, I trust my talent. It never has let me down. She wasn't sorry for the other girl because there wasn't another girl. And her statement that she didn't die? A funny way of putting it at best, right? So the only conclusion I can come to is that Penny Sanderson did die, and that she's now… back from the dead!'

The gathered espers let their air out in a concerted sigh. All of them. And Trask finished off with: 'Of course, I couldn't tell the police she'd been — what the hell — brought back, resurrected? So I simply said she was OK. Just how "OK" she is… well, that's a different matter.'

At which point the Minister Responsible took his best yet opportunity to introduce a further item of damning information. 'Clarke sent Keogh the files on all those murdered girls. And up in the Castle on the Mount in Edinburgh, he actually let the Necroscope talk to Penny Sanderson — er, in his own way, you understand.'

Ben Trask, despite what he himself had just related, still wasn't one hundred per cent convinced. 'But at the time, wasn't that the idea? So that Harry could find out who killed her?'

The Minister nodded. 'That was the idea.' He dabbed at his face with a handkerchief. 'But a bad one, it now seems.'

It was Paxton's turn. 'He's a telepath,' he said, his voice hard-edged, defiant.

'Harry?' Ben Trask stared at him.

Paxton nodded. 'He was into my mind like a ferret down a rat-hole! He warned me off and told me he wouldn't be warning me again. Also, his eyes were feral: they shone behind those dark glasses he wears. And he doesn't much care for the sunlight.'

'You've really been hard at work, haven't you?' Trask growled. But this time he couldn't accuse him of lying.

'Look,' said the other, 'I was given a job to do. Like the Minister said, after Wellesley he couldn't take any chances. So when Clarke came back from the Greek islands I hooked into him. And I learned about his suspicion that maybe Keogh was a vampire. Another thing: Keogh told me to tell the Minister that his "worst nightmare" had come true. Ergo: Keogh's a vampire!'

The Minister was quick to add: 'That last isn't proven yet. But it is starting to look that way. The thing is, Keogh has had a lot of contact with these creatures. Close contact. Maybe this last time there was a little too much contact.'

Paxton again: 'Look, I know I'm a relative newcomer, and you don't much like me, and in the past you've all had reason to be grateful for Harry Keogh. But have these things blinded you to the facts? OK, so you don't want to believe me — don't even want to believe yourselves — but just think what we're up against if we're right.

'He can talk to the dead, who apparently know a hell of a lot. He uses the Möbius Continuum to go anywhere he wants to, instantly, like we take a step into another room. He's a telepath. And now he not only speaks to the dead but calls them back, too!'

'He could do that before,' said Ben Trask, not without a shudder.

'But now he calls them back to what looks like life.' Paxton was relentless. 'From their ashes! Life? Or undeath?'

At which David Chung gave a mighty start, reeled like someone had hit him, and choked something out in Cantonese. Most of the espers were on their feet by now, but Chung gropingly found a chair and flopped down again. Frowning, the Minister Responsible said, 'Mister Chung?'

Chung's pallor gave his face a sickly lemon tint. He wiped his shining brow and licked his lips, and again mumbled something to himself in Chinese. Then he looked up and his eyes were wide. 'You all know what I do,' he said, his words a little sibilant and clipped in his fashion. 'I'm a locator, sympathetic. I take a model or a piece of something and use it to find the real thing. It's Branch policy that I take and keep safe from each one of you a small item of your personal belongings. This is for your own safety: if you go missing, I can find you.

'Well, I also have several items belonging to Harry Keogh, stuff he's left here from time to time…

'I was out in the Mediterranean with the others. I knew Zek Föener had been worried about something, and so I too have been keeping tabs on Harry. I told myself it was for his own good. But I knew what I was doing and what I was looking for.

'At first when I scried on him it was just him; there was nothing different; it felt right. I got a picture of him, you know? Not doing anything, just a picture of him as I knew him, up there at his home in Edinburgh or wherever he was. But recently the picture has been dim, misty, and last night and this morning there wasn't much of Harry there at all; just a mist, a fog. I was going to submit a report on it tomorrow.'

'In the old days,' Trask said, 'we used to call that mind-smog. It's what you get when you try to scan a vampire.'

'I know,' Chung nodded. He was more nearly recovered now. 'It was partly that which hit me, and partly something else. Paxton said that Harry could call dead people up from their ashes. That's what hit me the most.'

'What?' the Minister was frowning again.

Chung looked at him. 'I also have things which used to belong to Trevor Jordan,' he said. 'And this morning, just by accident, I happened to touch one of them. It was like Trevor was right here, right next door or down the street. And I thought it was something out of my memory. It was there and then it was gone. But it just struck me that he very well could have been here, just down the street!'

The Minister still hadn't taken it in, but Trask soon took care of that. Pale as a ghost, he whispered: 'My God! Jordan was cremated out in Rhodes, burned to ashes in case he'd been infected with vampirism. But Jesus, now that I think of it, I remember how it was Harry Keogh who insisted on it!'