Necroscope 4: Deadspeak (24 page)

And nightfall had found Harry in the long grasses by the river’s edge, painfully regaining consciousness in a world where he now knew beyond any doubt that he was a Necroscope no more. He could no longer communicate with the dead. Or at least, not consciously.

But asleep and dreaming …?

Haaarry
… his mother’s voice called to him again, echoing through the endlessly labyrinthine vaults of his otherwise empty dream.
I’m here, Harry, here.
And before he knew it he’d turned off and passed through a door, and stood once again on the riverbank, this time in streaming moonlight. And:
Is that you, Harry?
Her hushed mental voice told him that she scarcely dared to believe it.
Have you really come to me?

“I can’t answer you, Ma!” he wanted to say, but could only remain silent.

But you have answered me, Harry,
was her reply. And he knew it was so. For the dead don’t require the spoken word; sufficient to think at them, if you have the talent.

Harry crumpled to the riverbank, adopted a foetal position, hugged his head with his arms and hands and waited for the pain—which didn’t come!

Oh, Harry, Harry!
she said at once.
Did you think that after that first time, I’d deliberately hurt you or cause you to hurt yourself?

“Ma, I—” (he tried it again, wincing expectantly as he got to his feet),”—I don’t understand!”

Yes, you do, son,
she tut-tutted.
Of course you do! It’s just that you’ve forgotten. You forget every time, Harry.

“Forgotten? Forgotten what, Ma? What do I forget every time?”

You forget that you’ve been here before, in dreams, and that what my grandson did to you doesn’t count here. That’s what you’ve forgotten, and you do it every time! Now call me up, Harry, so that I can talk to you properly and walk with you a little way.

Was that right, that he could talk to her in dreams? He had used to in the old days—waking and dreaming alike—but it wasn’t like that now.

But it
is
like it now, son. It’s just that you need reminding each time!

And then another voice, not his mother’s, echoing more in the caverns of his memory than his sleeping mind proper:

…
You may not consciously speak to the dead. And if they speak to you, then you must strike their words immediately from memory or—suffer the consequences.

“My son’s voice,” he sighed, as understanding came at last. “So, how many times have we talked, Ma? I mean, since it started to hurt me … in the last four years, say?” And even as she began to answer him he called her up, so that she rose from the water, reached out and took his hand, and was drawn up onto the bank—a young woman again, as she’d been on the day she died.

A dozen, twenty, fifty times
(a mental shrug).
It’s hard to say, Harry. For always it’s more difficult to get through to you. And oh, how we’ve missed you, Harry.

“We?” He took her hand and they walked along the dark river path together, under a full moon riding high through a cloud-wispy sky.

Me and all your friends, the teeming dead. A hundred there are all eager to hear your gentle voice again, son; a million more who would ask what you said; and all the rest to inquire how you’re doing and what’s become of you. And as for me: why, I’m like an oracle! For they know that I’m the one you speak to most of all. Or used to
…

“You make me feel like I’ve forsaken some olden trust,” he told her. “But there never was one. And anyway, it isn’t so! I can’t help it that I can no longer talk to you. Or that I can’t remember the times when I do. And how has it become difficult to get through to me? You called me and I came. Was that so difficult?”

But you don’t always come, Harry. Sometimes I can feel you there, and I call out to you, and you shy away. And each time the waiting grows longer between visits, as if you no longer cared, or had forgotten us. Or as if, perhaps, we’d become a habit? Which you now desire … to break?

“None of that is true!” Harry burst out. But he knew that it was. Not a habit which
he
would break, no, but one which was being broken for him—by his fear. By his terror of the mental torture which talking to the dead would bring down on him. “Or if it is true,” he said, more quietly now, “then it’s not my fault. My mind would be no good to you burned out, Ma. And that’s what will happen if I push my luck.”

Well,
(and suddenly he was aware of a new resolve in her voice, and of the strengthening of her cold fingers where they gripped his hand),
then something must be done about it! About your situation, I mean—for there’s trouble brewing, son, and the dead lie uneasy in their graves. Do you remember I told you, Harry, there was someone who wanted to talk to you? And how what he had to say was important?

“Yes, I remember. Who is he, Ma, and what is it that’s so important?”

He wouldn’t say, and his voice came from far, far away. But it’s strange when the dead feel pain, Harry, for death usually puts them beyond it.

Harry felt his blood run cold. He remembered only too well how the dead, in certain circumstances, felt pain. Sir Keenan Gormley, murdered by Soviet mindspies, had been “examined” by Boris Dragosani, a necromancer. And dead as he had been, he had felt the pain. “Is it … like that?” he asked his mother now, holding his breath until she answered.

I
don’t know how it is,
she turned to him and looked him straight in the eye,
for this is something I’ve never known before. But Harry, I fear for you!
And before he could even attempt to reassure her:
Oh, son, son, my poor little Harry—I fear so very, very much for you! Is it like that, you ask? And I say: will it be—can it
ever
be—like that again? And how, if you’re no longer a Necroscope? And then I pray that it can’t be. So you see, son, how I’m torn two ways. I miss you, and all the dead miss you, but if it puts you in danger then we can do without it.

He sensed that she was avoiding something. “Ma, are you sure you don’t know who he is, this one who tried to contact me? Are you sure you don’t know
where
he is, right now?”

She let go his hand, turned away, avoided his eyes.
Who he is, no,
she said.
But his voice, his mental voice, Harry, crying out like that. Oh, yes, I know where he is. And all the dead know it, too. He’s in hell!

Frowning, he took her shoulders, gently turned her until she faced him again, and said, “In hell?”

She looked at him, opened her mouth—and nothing but a gurgle came out! She coughed chokingly, spat blood … then straightened up, swelled out, wrenched herself free of his suddenly feeble grasp. He saw something in her mouth, forked and flickering, which wasn’t a human tongue! Her skin sagged and grew old, becoming wormy as centuried parchment in a moment! Flesh sloughed from her bones, revealed her skull, smoked into dust as it fell from her like a rotting shroud! She cried out her horror, turned and fled away from him along the riverbank, paused a moment over the bight and looked back. A rancid, disintegrating skeleton, she
laughed
at him even as she toppled into the water—and he saw that her eyes glowed crimson in the moonlight, and that the teeth in her skull were sharp, curving fangs!

Nailed to the spot—fear-frozen there—Harry could only cry out after her: “Ma-aaa!” But it wasn’t his mother who heard and answered him:

Haaarry!
the voice came from a long way away, but still Harry whirled on the riverbank, staring this way and that in the moon-silvered night. There was no one there.
Haaarry!
it came again, but clearer in his mind.
Haaarry Keeeooogh!
And it was just as his mother had described it: a voice full of hell’s own torment.

Still stunned by his mother’s metamorphosis—which he knew could only be some sort of dire warning, for it was nothing she would ever deliberately engineer—Harry was at first unable to answer. But he recognized the voice’s despair, its anguish, its hopelessness, as it continued to call to him:

Harry, for God’s sake! If you’re out there please answer me. I know you shouldn’t, I know you daren’t—but you
must!
It’s happening again, Harry, it’s happening again\

The voice was fading, its signal weakening, its telepathic potency waning. If Harry was ever to get to the bottom of this he must do so now. “Who are you?” he said. “What do you want of me?”

Haaarry! Harry Keogh! Help us!
Its owner hadn’t heard him; the voice was tailing away, beginning to merge with a wind sprung up along the riverbank.

“How?” he shouted back. “How can I help you? I don’t even know who you are!” But he suspected that he did. It was a rare thing for the dead to speak to him without rapport first being established by some form of introduction. Usually he had sought them out, following which they would normally be able to find him again. Which made him suspect that he’d known this one (or these ones?) before, probably in life.

Haaarry—for God’s sake find us and make an end of it!

“How can I find you?” Harry shouted into the night, wanting to cry from the sheer frustration of it. “And what’s the point of it? I won’t even remember, not when I’m awake.”

And then—the merest whisper fading into nothing, and yet powerful enough to call up a wind that howled along the riverbank and snatched at Harry, causing him to lean into it—there came that final exhortation which chilled the ex-Necroscope’s blood to ice-water, sent gooseflesh creeping on his spine and wrenched him back into the waking world:

Find us and put us down!
the unknown voice implored.
Put an end to these scarlet threads right now, before they can grow. You know the way, Harry: sharp steel, the wooden stake, the cleansing fire. Do it, Harry. Please … do … it!

Harry sprang awake. Sandra was clinging to him, trying to hold him down. He was drenched in cold sweat, shaking like a leaf; and she was frightened, too, her eyes wide from it, her mouth forming a frozen “O”.

“Harry, Harry!” she lay sprawled half across him. She let go his shoulders, hugged his neck, felt his heart pounding against her breast. “It’s all right, it’s all right. It was a bad dream, a nightmare, that’s all.”

Eyes wide and darting, shivering and panting for breath, he stared all around the room and let its familiarity wash over him. Sandra had put on the light the moment his shouting had brought her awake. “What?” he said, his hands trembling where they clutched her. “What?”

“It’s all right,” she insisted. “A dream, that’s all.”

“A dream?” Her words sank in and something of the gaunt vacancy went out of his eyes. He gently pushed her away, began to sit up—then drew air in a gasp and started bolt upright! “No,” he blurted, “it was more than just a dream—much more. And Christ, I have to
remember!”

But too late; already it was receding, draining back to the roots of his subconsciousness. “It was about… about—” he desperately shook his head and sent a spray of sweat flying, “—my mother! No, not about her but … she was in it! It was … a warning? Yes, a warning, and … something else.”

But that was all. It was gone, driven out against his will by the will of some other—the will, or legacy, of his son—by the post-hypnotic commands he’d planted there in Harry’s mind.

“Shit!” Harry whispered, damp and shivering where he sat on the edge of the bed.

That had been at 4:05
A.M.
Harry had had maybe three and a half hours” sleep, Sandra an hour less. When he’d finally calmed down and put on his dressing-gown, then she had made a pot of coffee. And as he sat there shivering and sipping at his drink, so she had tried to bring his dream back to mind, had urged him to remember it … all the while cursing herself inside that she’d slept right through it! For if she had stayed awake she might just have caught a glimpse of the terrible thing he’d experienced, whatever it had been. That was her job: help him sort out his mind and get back what he’d lost. Whether he wanted it or not, and whether or not it was good for him.

But: “No use,” he’d shaken his head after long minutes of patient questioning, “it’s gone. And probably best that it’s gone. I have to be … careful.”

Sandra had been tired. She hadn’t asked why he must be careful because she knew. But she should have asked because she wasn’t supposed to know. And when she’d looked at him again his soulful eyes had been steady on her, his tousled head tilted a little on one side, perhaps questioningly. “What’s your interest, anyway?” he’d wanted to know.

“Only that if you get it off your chest you’ll feel better about it.” At least her lie had the ring of logic to it. “Once a nightmare is told, it’s not so frightening.”

“Oh? And that’s your understanding of nightmares, is it?”

“I was trying to be helpful.”

“But I keep telling you I can’t remember, and you keep prodding away at me. It was just a dream, and no one tries
that
hard to winkle someone else’s dreams out of them! Not without a damn good reason, anyway. There’s something not right here, Sandra, and I think I’ve known it for some time. Old Bettley says it’s my fault that what we have isn’t exactly right for me, but now I’m not so sure.”

There was no answer to that and so she’d kept quiet, acted hurt, drawn apart from him. But in fact she’d known that he was the one who was hurt, and that was the last thing she wanted. And when he finally got back into bed and she joined him there, then it had become obvious how cold he was, how stiff and silent and thoughtful where he lay with his back to her …

A little over an hour later she was awake again, a call of nature. Harry slept on, heavy in the bed, dead to the world. That thought made her shiver a little as she rejoined him; but of course he wasn’t dead, just exhausted, mentally if not physically. His limbs were leaden, his eyes still, his breathing deep, slow and regular. No more dreams. Dawn was maybe three-quarters of an hour away.