Necroscope V: Deadspawn n-5

by Brian Lumley

  God again?

  The balance between Good and Evil.

  Which all had origin in the same source? Your argument, August Ferdinand! Remember, ‘there was nothing before The Beginning’. Right?

  We’re not in dispute, Möbius shook his head. On the contrary, we’re in complete agreement!

  Harry was astonished. God had a dark side?

  Oh, yes, which he cast out!

  The mathematician’s words and their delivery had riveted Harry. And I can do the same? Is that what you’re saying?

  I’m saying that the other places are like levels, some of which are higher and some lower. And what we do here determines the next step. We go up or down.

  Heaven or Hell?

  Möbius shrugged again. If it helps you to think of it like that.

  You mean that when I move on, I can leave my dark side — maybe even my vampire — behind me?

  While there’s a difference, yes.

  A difference?

  While we may still distinguish between you.

  You mean if I don’t succumb?

  I have to go now, said Möbius.

  But I have to know more! Harry was desperate.

  I was allowed to come back, Möbius said, simply. But I am not allowed to stay. My new place is higher, Harry. I really can’t afford to lose it.

  Wait! Harry tried to stir himself, sit up and take hold of Möbius’s wrist. But he couldn’t move and anyway, it would be like trying to grasp smoke. And like a set of his own esoteric formulae, the great man mutated into nothingness and was gone…

  If anything Möbius’s visit had wearied Harry even more than before. He drifted deeper into sleep. But his vampire-influenced mind was full of a certain name, which tormented him and wouldn’t let him be. And the name was Johnny Found.

  Harry was a telepath; he had a quest, a task which he must finish; and he had a vampire in him. When he had gone to face Faéthor Ferenczy’s bloodson Janos in the mountains of Transylvania, the Ferenczy had warned him that only one of them would come out of it alive, and that the winner would be a creature of incredible power. Janos had read the future, seen the same thing, known he couldn’t lose. Except… one should never try to understand the future. Read it if you must, but don’t try to understand it. Harry had been the one who came down out of the mountains. And though he didn’t yet have the measure of his powers — especially his most recent acquisition, telepathy — still they were incredible. They had been incredible before, but now, with the booster which was his vampire…

  Dreaming, he no longer had control over his talents, which were active nevertheless. Dreams are the clearinghouses of the mind, where the balance is kept, the cutting-room where all the junk and trivia of life are discarded and the meaningful set in order. That is the function of men’s dreams. That and wish fulfilment. And also, for anyone with a conscience, the elevation of suppressed guilt. Which is why men sometimes nightmare.

  Harry had his share of guilt, and more than sufficient of desires requiring fulfilment. And what he himself had failed to put in order during his waking hours, his subconscious self — and the vampire which was part of it — would try to put in order while he slept.

  His enhanced awareness spread outwards from him to form a telepathic probe which, in a moment, unerringly, leaped all the miles to its target in Darlington. For that target was the sleeping mind of Johnny Found, a mind with a talent as weird as it was warped. Which Harry desired to know about.

  And with the sinister guile of the vampire, he need only hint, suggest, propose, strike this chord or maybe that, and with any luck at all Johnny Found would tell him.

  All of it…

  Johnny was dreaming, too, of his childhood. This wasn’t something he would do voluntarily, but a night spectre kept rapping on the door of childhood memories and demanding that he open it.

  Childhood memories? Oh, he had them, but he wouldn’t say they were worth remembering or dreaming about. Which was why he didn’t. Usually.

  He tossed a little in his bed; his subconscious mind moaned and went to take up a hammer to nail shut the door to his past; something pushed the hammer aside, beyond his reach, and Johnny could only watch helplessly as the door creaked open. Inside, all the Bad Things of yesterday were waiting for him: the many small crimes he had committed, and the range of punishments and penalties he’d been made to pay for them. But he’d been a child then and innocent (so they said) and would soon grow out of it; and only Johnny himself had known he wouldn’t ever grow out of it, and that they’d never be able to find punishments severe enough to fit his crimes.

  They’d tried to convince him that the things he did were bad, and had almost succeeded, but by then he was old enough to know that they lied to him, because they didn’t understand. And because they didn’t understand, they would never know how good the things were which he did. How good they made him feel.

  Yes, it had been a lonely place, childhood, where no one understood him or wanted to know about… the things he did. Because they didn’t want even to think of such things, let alone know about them.

  Lonely, yes, the place beyond that beckoning door. And how much more lonely if he hadn’t had the dead things to talk to? And to play with. And to torment.

  But because he’d had that — his secret thing, his clever way with creatures which were no more — being an orphan hadn’t been nearly so bad. Because he’d known there were others worse off than him, whose plight was far worse. And that if it wasn’t, then Johnny could soon make it worse.

  The open door both repelled and attracted him. Beyond it, the mists of memory swirled, eddied and hypnotized him; until — against his will? — Johnny found himself drifting in through the door. Where all his childhood was waiting for him…

  They’d called him ‘Found’ because he had been, in a church. And the pews had vibrated with his screams, and the rafters had echoed with them, that Sunday morning when the verger had come to see what all the to-do was about. He was still bloody from birth, the foundling, and wrapped in a Sunday newspaper; and the placenta which had followed him into the world still warm in a plastic bag, stuffed under the bench in one of the pews.

  But lusty? Johnny had screamed to wreck his lungs, howled to break the stained-glass windows and bring down the ceiling, almost as if he’d known he had no right to be in that church. Perhaps his poor mother had known it, too, and this had been her attempt at saving him. Which had failed. And not only was Johnny lost, but so was she.

  In any case, he’d yelled like that until they took him out of the church to the intensive care unit of a local hospital’s maternity ward. And only then, away from God’s house, had he fallen silent.

  The ambulance which whirled him to the hospital carried his mother, too, found seated against a headstone in the churchyard in a pool of her own blood, head lolling on her swollen breasts. Except unlike Johnny she didn’t survive the journey. Or perhaps she did, for a little while…

  A strange start to a strange life, but the strangeness was only just beginning.

  In the intensive-care ward Johnny had been washed, cared for, given a cot and, for the moment — and indeed for all his life — a name. Someone had scribbled ‘Found’ on the plastic tag which circled his little wrist, to distinguish him from all the other babies. And Found he’d stayed.

  But when a nurse had looked in on him to see why he’d stopped sobbing and gone quiet so suddenly… that had been the weirdest thing of all. Or perhaps not, depending on one’s perspective. For his young mother hadn’t been quite dead after all. And perhaps she’d heard the babies crying and had known that one of them was hers. That must be the answer, surely? For what other explanation could there be?

  There Johnny’s unnamed, unknown mother had sat, beside his empty cot; and Johnny in her dead arms, sucking a dribble of cold milk from a dead, cold nipple.

  Johnny was at an infant orphanage until he was five, then fostered for three more years until the couple who had taken him split up
in tragic circumstances. After that he went to a junior orphanage in York.

  About his foster parents: the Prescotts had kept a large house on the very outskirts of Darlington, where the town met the countryside. At the time they adopted Johnny in 1967, they already had a small daughter of four years; but there had been problems and Mrs Prescott was unable to have more children. A pity, for the couple had always planned to be the ‘perfect’ family unit: the pair of them, plus one boy and one girl. Johnny would seem to fit the bill nicely and make up the deficiency.

  And yet David Prescott had been uneasy about the boy from the very first time he saw him. It was nothing solid, just — something he could never quite put his finger on — a feeling; but because of it things were just a little less perfect than they should be.

  Johnny was given the family name and became a Prescott — for the time being, anyway. But right from the start he didn’t get along with his sister. They couldn’t be left alone together for five minutes without fighting, and the glances they stabbed at each other were poisonous even for mismatched children. Alice Prescott blamed her small daughter for being spoilt (which is to say she blamed herself for spoiling her), and her husband blamed Johnny for being… odd. There was just something, well; odd about the boy.

  ‘Well, of course there is!’ His wife would round on him. ‘Johnny’s been a waif, without home and family except in the shape of the orphanage. Yes, and that wasn’t the best sort of place, either! Love? Suffer the little children? They seemed altogether too eager to be rid of him, if you ask me! Precious little of love there!’

  And David Prescott had wondered: With reason, maybe? But what possible reason? Johnny isn’t even six yet. How can anyone turn against a child that small? And certainly not an orphanage, charged with the care of such unfortunates.

  The Prescotts had a corner shop which did very nicely, a general store that sold just about everything. It was less than a mile from their home, on the main road into Darlington from the north, and served a recently matured estate of some three hundred homes. Working nine till five four days a week, and Wednesday and Saturday mornings, they made a good living out of it. With the help of a part-time nanny, a young girl who lived locally, they were not overstretched.

  David kept pigeons in a loft at the bottom of their large secluded garden; Alice liked to be out digging, planting and growing things when the day’s work was done; they took turns seeing to the kids on those occasions when their nanny took time off. So that apart from the friction between Johnny and his sister Carol, the lives of the Prescotts could be said to be normal, pleasant and fairly average. Which was how things stood until the summer when Johnny turned eight. Indeed until then, their lives might even be described as idyllic.

  But that was when David Prescott started having problems with his birds; and the family cat — a placid, neutered torn called Moggit, who slept with Carol and was the apple of her eye — went out one morning and never came back in; and there were long periods of that hot, sultry weather which irritates, exacerbates, and occasionally causes eruptions. And it was the same summer when David built a pool for the kids, and roofed it over with polythene on an aluminium frame.

  Johnny had thought it would be great fun, swimming and fooling around in his own pool, but he soon became bored with it. Carol loved it, however, which annoyed her adopted brother: he didn’t care for people enjoying things which he didn’t enjoy, and in any case he didn’t much care for Carol at all.

  Then, one morning three or four days after Moggit had gone missing, Johnny got up early. He didn’t know it, but Carol was awake and throwing her clothes on as soon as she heard his door gently opening and closing. Her brother (she always put a heavy sneering accent on the word), had been getting up early a lot recently — hours before the rest of the household — and she wanted to know what he was doing. It wasn’t especially malicious of her, but the fact was she was a little jealous and more than a little curious. Even if Johnny was a pig, still she’d rather have him playing with her in the pool than off on his own playing his stupid, mysterious, lonely games.

  As for Johnny: his time was all his own now and no one to make demands on it. School was out for the summer holidays; he had ‘things’ to do; he could usually be found beyond the garden wall, in the hedgerows where they blended into meadow and farmland that stretched out and away to the north and north west. But he would always come when he was wanted (a loud call would usually bring him home directly), and he was sensible about getting back for mealtimes.

  Just what he did out there all the hours of the day was something else. If his foster-parents asked him, he would say, ‘Playing,’ and that was all. But Carol wanted to know what it was he played at. It was beyond her that he could find anything more interesting than the pool. So she went out after him, tiptoeing past her parent’s room, into the early morning light where dawn hadn’t long cracked the horizon with its golden smile.

  Johnny went down past the pool under its polythene blister to the garden wall. He climbed the high wall at a well-known spot, jumped down the last few feet on the other side. And he started out along the overgrown hedgerow into the maze of fields shimmering in the morning light. And Carol right after him.

  Half a mile into the fields, at a junction of ancient, rutted, overgrown tracks, the jumbles of a ruined farm lay humped and green with flowering brambles and clumps of nettles, where sections of broken, grey-lichened wall and the buttressed mass of an old chimney poked up in teetering stacks of stone. Johnny cut diagonally through a meadow and only his dark head, shiny with sweat, could be seen above the tall, swaying grass.

  From where she balanced precariously on top of a disused stile, Carol saw where he was heading and resolved to follow him. The old ruin was obviously Johnny’s secret place, where he played his secret games. But they wouldn’t be secret much longer.

  Johnny had disappeared somewhere into the tumble of fallen, weed-grown walls by the time his sister came panting out of the meadow. She paused a while and looked this way and that, along the tracks which had once serviced the farm, then made to cross them to the ruins… and paused again!

  What was that! A cry! The cry of a cat? Moggit?

  Moggit!

  Carol’s hand flew to her mouth. She drew a gasping breath and held it. What, poor little Moggit, lost somewhere in the shell of this crumbling old pile? Maybe that was what had drawn Johnny here: the sound of Moggit, jammed in some hole, trapped and starving in this tottering ruin.

  Carol thought to call out in answer to Moggit’s strange, choking cries and maybe bring him a little hope; but then she thought no, for that would only make him struggle the harder and perhaps get himself in more of a fix. Maybe he was only crying like that, so urgently and piteously, because Johnny was already trying to rescue him.

  Holding her breath, Carol crossed the hard-packed, dusty tracks to what once would have been a wide entrance through high farmyard walls to the cluster of buildings within. Now the gap was a mass of collapsed stone choked by brambles and bolting ivy, with a few hazelnuts and straggly elders crushed under the weight of parasitic green. Broken bricks and rubble shifted underfoot where a well-marked trail had been worn through the undergrowth, Carol supposed by Johnny.

  Dusty and cobwebbed, the trail in through the foliage was almost a tunnel; the light was shut out; seven-year-old Carol felt stifled as she forced her way through. But when she might have faltered, Moggit’s howls (she was sure it must be Moggit, while at the same time praying it was not) drove her on. Until finally she broke cover into yellow sunlight, and blinking the grit out of her eyes saw Johnny where he sat in the central clearing. And saw the…

  … The things he had there; but without really seeing them at first, because her child’s mind couldn’t conceive, couldn’t believe. And finally she saw… but no, no, there was no way that this could be Moggit.

  What, Moggit of the snow-white belly and paws, the bushy tail and Lone Ranger masked face, the sleek, gleaming black back and neck
and ears? This tortured, dangling thing, Moggit? Carol almost fainted; she slumped down behind a broken wall and knocked loose a brick, and Johnny heard the clatter. When his head snapped round on his neck to look Carol’s way, he didn’t see her at first, only the ruins in the clearing as he’d always known them. But Carol still saw him: his bloated face, bulging, emotionless eyes, and bloody, clawlike hands. His penknife lying open beside him on the wall where he sat, and the sharpened stick with its red point clutched tight in one hand.

  And she still saw Moggit, too. Moggit with his hind paws just touching the ground, feebly dancing to stay upright and keep his weight off his neck, which was encircled by a thin wire noose that hung down from the branch of an elder! And one yellow eye hanging out on a thread, dribbling wetly and dancing on his wet furry cheek even as Moggit danced; and his fat white belly thin and crimson now where it had been slit open to let a bulge of shiny black, red and yellow entrails dangle!

  And Moggit wasn’t all. There were two of Carol’s father’s favourite pigeons, too, hanging limp from other branches with their wings twisted all askew. And a hedgehog still alive but with a rusty iron spike through its side, pinning it to the ground; so that it staggered dizzily round and around on its own axis in unending agony, snuffling horribly. Yes, and there were other things, too, but Carol didn’t want to see any more.

  Johnny, satisfied that no one was there, had returned to his ‘game’. Through eyes that were brimming with tears, Carol saw him stand up, catch a dead pigeon in one hand and thrust his stick right through its clay-cold body. And he worked the stick in its unfeeling flesh almost as if… as if it wasn’t unfeeling at all! As if he really believed that the bedraggled, stiff, broken thing could feel it. And all the while he laughed and talked and muttered to these poor, tortured, alive or dead or soon-to-be-dead creatures, caring nothing for their waking or sleeping agonies. Indeed, his sister now understood something of the nature of his game: that having harried a living thing to its death, Johnny couldn’t bear that it had escaped him and so continued to torture it in the lightless world beyond!