Necroscope 4: Deadspeak (23 page)

Suddenly angry with herself—wanting to throw off all the covers and leap out of bed, but caring enough that she wouldn’t disturb him—she carefully removed his hand from where it lay draped diagonally across her and slid sideways out from between the sheets. And naked she went to the bathroom.

She was neither warm nor cold nor thirsty, but she felt she had to do something. Something ordinary, to herself, to change herself physically. And that way perhaps to change her mood, too. In the daytime it would be the simplest thing: she would walk to the park and watch the smallest children at play, and know that something of their worlds of faerie would soon find its way into her own far less Elysian existence. And when that thought came, she knew for certain that for someone who was usually so positive, she must now be feeling pretty damned negative. That she should need someone else’s innocence to balance the weight of her own guilt.

She drank a glass of water, splashed cold water up under her arms and breasts where their lovemaking had made her perspire, towelled her flesh dry and examined herself critically in the long bathroom mirror.

Unlike Harry, there was little or no naiveté in Sandra. There might be, except for her telepathy. But it’s hard to be naive or innocent in a world where people’s minds are wont to flutter open like pages in a book, and you don’t have the power to look away but must read what’s written there. The other E-Branch telepaths—people like Trevor Jordan—were luckier in this respect; they were obliged to apply, channel their talent; it didn’t just come and go for them, like a badly-tuned radio station.

Angry again, Sandra shook her head. There she went again: great waves of self-pity! What? Pity for herself? For this beautiful creature in the mirror? And how often had she heard it broadcast, from so many of those stations out there:
God, but what I’d give to be like her!

Ah, if only they knew!

But how much worse if she’d been ugly …?

She had large, greeny-blue, penetrating eyes over a small, tilted nose; a mouth she’d trained to be soft and uncynical; small ears almost lost in the burnish of copper hair, and high cheek-bones curving down delicately to a rounded, rather self-conscious chin. Of course she was conscious of herself. Other people were, and so she had to be.

Her right eyebrow, a slightly upward-tilted line of bronze, was questioning, almost challenging. As if she were saying: “Go on—think it!” And sometimes she was.

Her smile was bright, rewarding, involuntary on those occasions when she detected complimentary thoughts. Or she might darken her high brow and narrow her eyes to knife-point at some of the other things she “heard”. At a glance, then, Sandra’s face might well be mistaken for the face on the cover of any number of glossy, popular ladies” magazines. But on closer inspection it would be seen that there were boundless tracts of character there, too. Her twenty-seven years had not left her unblemished; there were laughter lines in the corners of her eyes, yes, but other faint lines lay parallel and horizontal on her brow, speaking volumes for the number of times she’d frowned. She was grateful that the latter didn’t detract from her looks overall.

As for the rest of her:

But for two personal criticisms, Sandra’s body would be near-perfect, or as close as she would wish it to be. She was too large “up top”, which gave her a bouncing elasticity she was afraid might type-cast her, and her legs were far too long.

“Well, you might find those things a disadvantage,” Harry’s voice came back to her from a previous time, “but I’m all for it!” He liked it when, in their lovemaking, she’d wrap her legs right round him; or when she let her breasts dangle in his face, inviting his attentions. Her large nipples, asymmetrical as most nipples are, seemed a constant fascination to him, at least on those occasions when he was all there. But far too often he’d be somewhere else entirely. And now another truth dawned on her: too often she’d used her sex to trap him in the here and now, as if she were afraid that if she released him he’d fly … somewhere else.

Suddenly cold, she put out the bathroom light and went back to the bedroom.

Harry lay just as she’d left him, on his side, facing left, his right arm draped in the hollow she’d occupied. And still his breathing was deep and steady, his eyelids unmoving. A brief telepathic glimpse, unbidden, denned endless, empty vaults of dream, through which he drifted looking for a door. It came and went, and Sandra sighed. There were always doors in Harry’s dreams, revenant perhaps of the Möbius doors he’d once called up mathematically out of thin air.

He’d once told her: “Now that it’s over I sometimes get this feeling it was all a dream, or a story read in a book of fantasy. Unreal, something I made up, or maybe an out-of-body experience. But that brings back all too clearly what it was really
like
to be incorporeal, and I know that it happened for a fact. How can I explain it? Have you ever dreamed you could fly? That you actually knew how to fly?”

“Yes,” she’d answered, in her mildly Edinburghian Scottish accent. “Often, and very vividly. I used to run down a steeply sloping field to take off, and soar up over the Pentland hills, over the village where I was born. It was sometimes frightening, but I remember knowing
exactly
how it was done!”

Harry had been excited. “That’s right! And waking up you tried to hang on to it, you were reluctant to let the secret vanish with the dream. And it vexed you when you were completely awake to learn that you were earthbound again. Well,” (and he’d sighed as his excitement ebbed), “that’s pretty much how it sometimes is for me. Like something I had in a long series of childhood dreams, but burned out of me now and gone forever.”

Better for you, Harry,
she’d thought.
That world was a dangerous place. You’re safe now.

But not much good for E-Branch, and definitely not why she was here. On the contrary, they wanted his powers restored and didn’t much care how. And she was supposed to be part of the restoration team.

She slipped into bed with him, as much for his warmth as for anything, and his free hand automatically cupped her breast. His body was lean and hard, well-trained. He insisted on keeping it that way. “It’s years older than me,” he’d once told her, without an ounce of humour, “and so I have to look after it.” As if it wasn’t his but something he was care-taking. Hard to believe there’d been a time when it really wasn’t his. But she hadn’t known him—or it—then, and was glad for that.

“Ummm?” he murmured now, as she moulded herself to him.

“Nothing,” she whispered in the darkness of the room. “Shh!”

“Ummm …” he said again, and instinctively drew her closer.

He was warm and he was Harry. She’d never felt so safe with anyone before. Him with all his hangups, and yet when she was with him like this it was like clinging to a rock. She stroked his chest, but gently so as not to awaken or arouse him, and tried to will him into deeper sleep—

—And like a fool willed herself there instead.

Haaarry …!
Harry’s Ma, Mary Keogh, called to him from her watery grave, and couldn’t get through to him. She never could these days, and knew why, but it didn’t stop her from trying.
Harry, there’s someone who’s trying very hard to talk to you. He says you were friends, and that what he has to say is very important.

Harry could hear her, but he couldn’t answer. He knew that he must
not
answer, for talking to the dead had been forbidden to him. If he should try it, or ever consider trying it, then once more he’d hear that irresistible voice in his mind, reinforcing those commands by means of which his Necroscope powers had been made worthless:

Under penalty of pain, you may not, Harry! Aye, great pain. Such torture that the voices of the teeming dead would be distorted beyond recognition. Such mental agony that you would never dare try again. I’ve no desire to be cruel, father, but it’s for your own protection—as well as mine. Faethor Ferenczy, Thibor, and Yulian Bodescu, they might well have been the last—or they might not. The Wamphyri have
powers,
father! And if there are more of them hidden in your world, how long before they seek you out and find you … before you can find them? But they will only seek you out if they have reason to fear you. Which is why I now remove such reason utterly! Do you understand?

To which Harry had answered: “You do it for yourself. Not because you fear for me, but for you. You fear that I’ll come back one day, discover you in your aerie and destroy you. I’ve told you I could never do that. Obviously my word isn’t good enough.”

People change, Harry. You could change, too. I’m your son, but I’m also a vampire. I can’t chance it that you’ll not come looking for me one day with sword and stake and fire. I’ve said it before: as a Necroscope you’re dangerous, but without the dead you’re impotent. Without them, no more Möbius Continuum. You can’t come back here, nor seek me in the other places. And yes, this is another reason why I place these strictures upon you.

“Then you doom me to torture. It’s inescapable. The dead love me. They
will
talk to me!”

They may try, but you will neither hear nor answer them. Not consciously. I hereby deny you that talent.

“But I’m a Necroscope! I talk to the dead out of habit! And what about when I grow old? If I ramble to the dead when I’m an old man, what then? Am I still bound to suffer? All my days?”

Habits are for breaking, Harry. I say it one last time, and then if you doubt me you may try it for yourself: you may not consciously speak to the dead, and if they speak to you, you must strike their words immediately from memory or—suffer the consequences. So be it.

“And all the maths Möbius taught me, am I to forget that, too?”

You have already forgotten it! That is my most immediate stricture, for I won’t be invaded in my own territory! Now be done with arguing, for it’s over, it
… is …
done!

At which Harry had felt a terrible wrenching in his mind, which made him cry out; followed by darkness; followed by …

… His return to consciousness in London, at E-Branch HQ.

That had been four years ago. He had told E-Branch all he could, helped them complete and close their files on him and all his works. He was no longer a Necroscope; he could no longer impose his metaphysical will on the physical universe; the branch should have no further use for him now. But even after they’d tried and discarded every means at their disposal to return his paranormal powers to him, still he’d been certain they wouldn’t let it rest there. As a Necroscope he’d been too great an asset. They’d never forget him, and if they could get him back they would. And so would his millions of friends, the teeming dead. Oh, Harry’s actual friends—his real comrades among the Great Majority—numbered around one hundred only. But the rest knew
of him.
To them he would always be the one light in their eternal darkness.

And now one of them, by far the most important one to Harry, was trying to speak to him again:

Harry, oh my poor little Harry! Why won’t you answer me, son?
He had always been her little Harry.

“Because I can’t,” he wanted to tell her—but dare not, not even asleep and dreaming. For he’d tried once before, down at the riverbank, and now remembered it only too well:

He’d gone there within the hour of his return to his home near Bonnyrig, the house which she had owned before him, and Viktor Shukshin in between. Shukshin had drowned her under the ice, and left her body to float to this bight in the frozen river. There she’d settled to the bottom, to become one with the mud, the weeds and the silt. And there she’d stayed—until the night Harry called her up again to take her revenge! Since when she’d lain here in peace, or been gradually washed away in pieces. But her spirit was here still.

And it had been here when, like so many times before, he’d gone to sit on the riverbank and look down at the water where it was untroubled and deep and dark in that slowly swirling backwater of reeds and crumbling clay bank. It had been daylight; brambles and weeds growing across the old, disused paths by the river; birdsong in the shady willows and spiky blackthorns.

There were three other houses there beside his own, two of them detached and standing well apart, in large walled gardens extending almost to the river. These two were empty and rapidly falling into disrepair; the third, next door, had been up for sale for several years now. Every so often people would come to look at it, and go away shaking their heads. These were not “desirable” residences. No, it was a lonely place, which was why Harry liked it. He and his Ma had used to talk in private here, and he’d never had to fear that someone might see him sitting here on his own, apparently mouthing nonsense to himself.

He hadn’t known what to expect that time; he only knew that conversation was forbidden, and that there’d be a penalty to pay if he tried to break the strictures placed on his esper’s mind. The acid test was the one thing E-Branch hadn’t attempted, mainly because he’d refused to go so far. Darcy Clarke had been in charge then, and Darcy’s talent had warned him away from pushing Harry, and Harry’s friends, too far.

But there on the river Harry’s mother, the spirit of the innocent girl she had been, had not been able to resist talking to her son again.

At first there had been only the solitude, the slow gurgle of the river, the birdsong. But in a little while Harry’s singular presence had been noted. And:
Harry?
she had come breathlessly awake in his mind.
Harry, is that you, son? Oh, I know it is! You’ve come home again, Harry!

That was all she’d said to him—but it had been enough.

“Ma—don’t!” he’d cried out, staggering to his feet and running, as someone ignited a Roman candle in his skull to shoot off its fireballs into the soft tissues of his brain! And only then had he known what The Dweller, Harry Jr., had really done to him.

Such mental agony that you will never dare try again!
That was what his vampire son had promised, and it was what he’d delivered. Not The Dweller himself, but the post-hypnotic commands he’d left behind, sealed in Harry’s mind.