by Brian Lumley
Unruffled, the Minister stared right back at him. “Are you saying that Paxton is wrong, Clarke?”
Clarke sighed again. “I saw Harry and Trevor last night, yes. He’s right that far.”
“So you’re saying that Keogh and Jordan aren’t vampires?” The Minister’s voice was very quiet.
Clarke looked at him, looked away, chewed his bottom lip. And the Minister prompted him: “They are vampires?”
Clarke faced him again and said, “Jordan … isn’t.”
“But Keogh is?”
Clarke snapped, “But you were already pretty sure of that, right? All thanks to”—he glanced fire at Paxton—“to this slimy shit! Yes, Harry’s been contaminated. He picked up this bloody thing protecting us—every single one of us—doing a job out in the Greek islands which I had asked him to help us with. So that, in my book at least, he’s not about to turn killer now! What more can I tell you?”
“We think quite a lot,” Paxton answered, but softly now, his pasty face reddening from the sting of Clarke’s insult.
Clarke looked at him, looked at the Minister, and felt no rapport. He wasn’t getting through to them at all. “Why don’t you let me tell it my way?” he pleaded. “And why don’t you try listening to me? Who knows, you may even learn something!”
But Paxton said, “Yes, and we might get thrown right off the track, too.”
Clarke glared at him, looked at the Minister across his desk, and said, “Look, your pet parrot here isn’t making much sense. Shit, I don’t understand a word! Do you know what he’s raving about?”
The Minister came to a decision, gave an abrupt nod, and said, “Clarke, I’m going to give it to you straight. E-Branch was monitoring your place last night. Yours and Jordan’s both. You see, we knew even before you did that Jordan was back from the dead, which is to say undead. What? A man dead and gone, yet up and about among the living? Undead! That’s how we see it, the only way we can see it. And not only Jordan but one of those murdered girls, too. Vampires, for there’s nothing else they can be.”
Clarke desperately cut in, “But if you’ll only listen to me—”
But the Minister wasn’t listening. “We know what time Keogh got to Jordan’s flat, the time they left it together, and where they went, and the fact that however much we don’t know—and even if you hadn’t admitted as much—still we’d be absolutely sure that Harry Keogh is a vampire! How can we be so sure? Because he carries all the stigmata. You could say he even smells of vampire: which is to say he covers himself in mind-smog. Do you follow me so far?”
“Of course I do,” Clarke answered, feeling his desperation increasing by leaps and bounds, knowing that the Minister was building a case, but what sort of case? Against whom? He had to take one last stab at getting through to him. “But can’t you see that even in this you’re wrong? With all due respect, you don’t know anything about vampires. You’ve had no experience of them. You’re not even talented. You only know what you’ve read or heard from others. And hearsay can’t make up for experience. See, this mind-smog you’re talking about is something Harry can’t control. He doesn’t ‘cover himself’ with it, it just is. It’s a result of what he is. Like a dog has a tail, Harry has mind-smog. It isn’t deliberate. In fact if he could get rid of it he would, for it’s a dead giveaway!”
The Minister looked questioningly at Paxton, who nodded however grudgingly. Or perhaps it wasn’t so much a grudging nod as a grim one. A nod of affirmation? And even as his apprehension went up another notch, so Clarke said, “So you see how easy it is to make mistakes?”
Unblinking, unwavering, the Minister said, “All vampires have this mind-smog, right?”
Clarke did blink, however, as his nerves started to jump. There was nothing to fear here, for his talent would warn him of it, but still his nerves were jumping. “As far as we know, yes,” he answered. “All of them that we’ve dealt with, anyway. When a telepath tries to scan a vampire, he gets mind-smog.”
“Darcy Clarke”—the Minister’s face was white now—“it must have taken a lot of nerve to come here. Either that or you’re a madman, or you really don’t know what’s happened to you.”
“Happened to me?” Clarke could feel the tension building and didn’t know what it was about. “What the hell are you talking … ?”
“You have mind-smog!” Paxton spat the words out.
Clarke’s jaw dropped. “What? I have … ?”
The Minister raised his voice. “You out there, Miss Cleary, and Ben. You can come in now.”
The door opened and Millicent Cleary stepped inside, with Ben Trask right behind her. The girl looked at Clarke and her voice was breathless as she said, “It’s true, sir. You … you have it.” She had always called Clarke “sir.” He looked at her, backed away a step, and shook his head.
But Ben Trask said, “Darcy, she’s telling the truth. Even Paxton is telling the truth.”
Clarke took two hesitant steps towards him … and Trask narrowed his eyes, backed off, and held up his arms to ward him off! Clarke saw the look in his old friend’s eyes and couldn’t believe it. “Ben, it’s me!” he said. “I mean, with your talent you have to know that I’m telling the truth, too!”
“Darcy,” Trask answered, still backing away, “you’ve been got at. It’s the only answer.”
“Got at?”
“Without you knowing it. You believe you’re telling the truth, and on our own that would be enough to throw me. But it’s two to one, Darcy. And you have been pretty close to Harry Keogh.”
Clarke spun on his heel, looked at the faces surrounding him. The Minister, white as chalk behind his desk. Paxton, grim-faced, his right hand nervously playing with the lapel of his jacket. Trask, whose talent had never once let him down—until now. And Millicent Cleary, still respectful for all that she’d just accused him of being a monster!
“Crazy, every damned one of you!” Clarke shakily husked. He thrust his left hand into his pocket, brought out his Branch ID, and tossed it onto the desk. “That’s it; I’m through with all of this; finished with the Branch for good. I’m walking.” He reached with his right hand inside his jacket and dragged his issue 9mm pistol into view—
—And Paxton yelled, “Freeze!” and aimed the gun which he had produced just a moment earlier.
Astonished, Clarke turned towards him—turned his empty gun towards him, too—and Paxton squeezed off two shots.
Simultaneous with the deafening reports, Millicent Cleary and Ben Trask yelled, “No!”
Too late, for Clarke had been hurled back halfway across the room by the first bullet, then swatted from his feet and tossed against the wall by the second. His gun went flying as he crumpled to his knees against the bloodied wall, and his hand crept tremblingly to an area over his heart. There were two holes in his jacket, both turning red and dripping through his twitching fingers. “Shit!” he whispered. And: “What—?”
He fell forward onto his face, rolled over onto his side, and Trask and the Cleary girl went to their knees beside him. The Minister was on his feet, aghast, holding on to the edge of the desk to keep from falling; and Paxton had come forward, his gun still at the ready, face pale as a sheet of paper with holes punched out for eyes and mouth. “He had a gun.” He gasped the words out. “He was going to use his gun!”
The Minister said, “I … I thought he was trying to hand it in. That’s what it looked like to me.”
Ben Trask cradled Clarke’s head, moaning, “Jesus, Darcy! Jesus!” The girl had unbuttoned Clarke’s jacket, torn open his crimson shirt. But the blood had almost stopped pumping.
Clarke looked down disbelievingly at his chest and the red life leaking out of him. “Not … not possible!” he said. And the fact was that yesterday it wouldn’t have been.
“Darcy, Darcy!” Trask said again.
“Not possible!” Clarke murmured for the last time, before his eyes filmed over and his head lolled into Trask’s lap. And as yet, no one had even called
for a doctor or an ambulance.
For long seconds the tableau held … until Paxton broke the silence with, “Get away from him! Are you crazy? Get away from him!”
Trask and the girl looked at him.
“His blood,” Paxton told them. “You have his blood all over you! He’ll contaminate you!”
Trask stood up and the horror slowly cleared from his eyes. The horror of what had happened, anyway. But his horror of Paxton was something else. “Darcy will contaminate … ?” he started to repeat Paxton, and took a long loping pace towards him. “His blood will contaminate us?”
Paxton backed off. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“Darcy was right,” Trask snarled. “About you.” He pointed at the Minister Responsible: “And you.” And he took another pace after Paxton.
“Back off!” Paxton warned him, waving his gun.
Trask caught his wrist and twisted it, and his strength was furious. The gun went clattering to the floor. “He never spoke a truer word,” Trask said, holding Paxton at arm’s length like a piece of stinking, rotten meat. “You don’t know anything about vampires except what you’ve read or been told. You have no experience of them. If you did you’d know that bullets don’t stop them—not for long, anyway! But poor Darcy there, if you have any talent at all you’ll know that he’s stone dead. And you killed him!”
“I … I …” Paxton struggled but he couldn’t free himself from Trask’s grip.
“Contaminate?” Trask grated through clenched teeth. He drew Paxton close and rubbed Clarke’s blood into his hair, his eyes and nostrils. “You piece of shit, what could contaminate you?” He drew back a ham of a hand and bunched it into a fist, and—
“Trask!” the Minister snapped. “Ben! Let Paxton go! Let it be! What’s done is done. An accident, maybe. A mistake, possibly. But it’s done. And it’s only one of several things we’re not going to like doing.”
Trask’s fist hung in midair, shaking with its need to crash into Paxton’s face. But as the Minister’s words sank in, so he tossed the telepath away from him. And lurchingly, almost drunkenly, he went back to Clarke’s crumpled, lifeless body.
The Minister said to Paxton, “Get a doctor … and an ambulance.” Then he saw the look on Paxton’s face.
The telepath had recovered both his wits and his nerve; he was cleaning his face with a large pocket handkerchief and shaking his head. His look said, Think what you’re saying, what you’re doing. And out loud he said, “We don’t need a doctor or an ambulance, just an incinerator. Clarke’s for burning, by us, right now. Right or wrong, we can’t take any chances with him. He’s for the fire just as soon as possible. And me, I’m for bathing. Trask, Cleary, I know how you must feel, but if I were you—”
“No, you don’t know how we feel.” Ben Trask looked up at him, all emotion gone now from his face.
“Anyway,” Paxton continued, “I’d bathe if I were you. And right now.”
The Minister indicated the door. “Go on, then,” he told Paxton. “Go and arrange … disposal. Do it now—and take a shower, too, if you feel it’s necessary—then report back to me.”
And after the telepath left the room, past the gaping espers where they crowded the corridor: “Ben,” said the Minister, “the killing has started. Right or wrong, like Paxton said, it’s started. And we both know it has to go on. So from now on I want you in charge of this thing. I want you to run the entire show, until it’s sorted out one way or the other.”
Trask stood up, leaned against the wall, looked at the Minister, and thought: One way or the other? No, it can only be one way, for the other is unthinkable. Well, someone has to do it, and I’m as experienced as any of them. More than most. And at least if I’m running it I’ll know that that idiot Paxton won’t be doing any more damage.
In the old days it would have been Darcy, Ken Layard, Trevor Jordan, and a handful of others. And Harry, of course. But this time they’d be hunting Harry himself, and that was different. And despite what Clarke had said, it looked like they’d be hunting Jordan, too. And the girl, Penny Sanderson? Jesus, according to the file she was just a kid! But an undead kid.
“All right?” said the Minister.
And Trask sighed and answered with an almost imperceptible nod. Yes, it was all right. And Paxton could well have been right, too. If there had been something—anything at all—wrong with Darcy …
Trask looked at the girl, her bloodied hands and blouse. “Shower,” he said simply. “And make a good job of it.” Then, when he and the Minister were alone, he said, “When Darcy’s been … burned, we have to scatter the ashes. Scatter them far and wide.” He gave a small shudder. “For the fact is, Harry Keogh does things with ashes. And I really don’t think I ever want to see Darcy again. Not on his feet, anyway.”
9:40 A.M.
Harry Keogh had just finished examining the personnel files at Frigis Express’s Darlington depot when three things happened simultaneously. One: the depot clerk, whom Harry had lured from his tiny box of an office with a bogus telephone call, returned unexpectedly. Two: Harry felt a pang—almost a pain—of a sort he’d never experienced before, within his chest, as if someone had doused his heart with ice water. And three: the fading echo of an unrecognized cry bounced off his mind to ricochet into an unreachable metaphysical limbo of its own. And it seemed to the Necroscope that whatever its source, it was intended specifically for him: as if his name had been called from the gulf between life and death.
Deadspeak? But this had been different. Telepathy? Well, maybe. Or a cross between the two? That seemed more likely, and Harry remembered how his mother had described the feeling in her own incorporeal heart when a pup called Paddy had been killed by a car on a Bonnyrig road.
So … had someone died? But who? And why had he cried out to Harry?
“Who the fuck are you?” demanded the burly, shirt-sleeved, redheaded clerk, as he herded Harry into the shadows of a dusty corner where the metal filing cabinet met the wall. He gaped at the former contents of the cabinet, now spilling across the floor.
Harry barely glanced at the man’s suspicious, mottled face and said, “Shh!”
“Shh!?” the other repeated him, disbelievingly. “You’ll get shh!, brother, breaking in here! Now, what’s the score?”
Harry was trying desperately to hang on to the diminishing, ethereal echo of … a cry for help? Was that what it had been? “Look,” he told the very untypical clerk, “be quiet a minute, will you?” He tried to push by him.
“Why you—!” Blotches of angry red appeared on the man’s jowly cheeks. “A con man and thief, right? I recognize your voice. It was you on the phone—right? Well, you picked the wrong man this time, thief!” He grabbed Harry by the lapels and looked like he was going to butt him in the face.
The Necroscope continued to concentrate on the cry, and at the same time reached out and caught his assailant by the throat. With one huge hand he held him at bay, choking, and with the other he reached up and took off his dark spectacles. The clerk saw his eyes and choked all the more, and commenced windmilling his arms as Harry shoved him effortlessly backwards, driving him across the floor. Finally, the clerk’s legs hit the edge of his desk and he sat down in a plastic paper tray, shattering it with his fat backside.
Still Harry held him, and still he listened for a repeat performance of the cry. But it was gone now, probably disappeared forever.
Harry felt anger expanding inside him—felt frustrated, cheated—and his hand on the clerk’s windpipe was like iron. His nails bit into the man’s flesh like it was putty, and Harry knew that if he wanted to he could crush his Adam’s apple and tear his throat out all in one. What’s more, the thing inside was urging him to do it, do it! But he didn’t. Instead he swept the clerk from the desktop and sent him crashing down among the debris of his shattering chair and a wooden wastepaper basket.
“My-my … G-God!” the clerk coughed and spat and massaged his throat, and crawled dazedly into a c
orner where he turned and looked back fearfully at the spot where the blood-eyed, fanged, furious stranger had been standing. But of course the Necroscope was no longer there. No one was there.
And again the clerk gurgled, “My God! My g-good G-God!”
Working from his list, alphabetically, Harry had already investigated three Frigis depots and installations: the vehicle depot at Alnwick, the slaughterhouse and meat dressing station in Bishop Auckland, and lastly the freezer complex in Darlington. So far he had copied the addresses of four possibles, all of them “Johns” or “Johnnys” and all drivers for the firm. Now, however, with the morning only halfway through, the weird mind-cry out of nowhere had disturbed him, damaged his resolve and destroyed his concentration; to such an extent that he took the Möbius route home to Bonnyrig, and from there contacted Trevor Jordan at the Castle on the Mount in Edinburgh.
Harry? Jordan came back at once, his telepathic “voice” full of his relief that the Necroscope was in touch again. I tried to reach you but your mind-smog was too dense, and getting thicker all the time. Can you come and get me? I think I may have a lead.
Harry nodded, just as if he was speaking to someone directly in front of him and not ten miles away, and said, Do you know the Laird’s Larder? It’s a coffee shop up there just off the Royal Mile. Ask anyone and they’ll direct you. I’ll be there in five minutes. But Trevor, tell me: Has anything peculiar happened? Have you felt anything strange? Do I need to be, well, more than usually careful how I move?
Watchers, you mean? The Branch? (A mental shake of the other’s head.) Not that I’ve detected. Maybe a tentative touch now and then, but nothing you could nail down. Nothing concentrated, anyway. If they have people up here, then they’re too good for me. And I’m pretty damn good!
No static? Paxton, maybe?
I don’t feel any static. Distantly, maybe, but nothing local. As for Paxton: I’m sure I’d be able to pick him up twenty miles away. And you?
