by Brian Lumley
“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 commence 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 once-over 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.”
“Okay.” 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, he became aware of the first small warning bells growing to an insistent clamor 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 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 go onto 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 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 were all 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 offense—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, I’m sure, later.”
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 for the moment keep him at arm’s length, 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?
&nbs
p; “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 awhile, 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 shoulder blades 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 “honorable” answer to any challenge may only be written in blood!
Wamphyri!
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 nucleic 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 which 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 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 marvelous 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 practiced 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 offenses, because they had no yardstick by which to measure them. They neither knew nor were capable of defining a full range of offenses, 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 something 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 further reducing 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 percent 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 ho
wever 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 thing, 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?
