Deadspawn

by Brian Lumley

  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. “Now I know her.”

  They left the officer talking into his walkie-talkie and scratching his head, 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.”

  Harry shivered. “Sicker than you think. 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 racked 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, sea gulls cried where they spiraled 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 woodsmoke.

  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 loo
k 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 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 four days back at his desk Clarke had cleared or at least commenced to clear quite a lot of it, 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 short-lived 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 occurrence—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, stetched 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 oil slick (a blood slick?) 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 a 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 forever 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 spear gun. The swath of blood beside the boat was bubbling, fuming, as some nameless thing drifted to the surface. A body, naked, facedown, 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 in on its fifth repeat performance when he reached for it, but the relief he’d felt at the first chirrup was short-lived; 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 commence a trace. “I’d thought I might hear 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 hunchmen, 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 p
lay the other at his own circuitous game. “Okay, 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 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 favors.”

  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 stuck 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?”