Necroscope n-1

by Brian Lumley

  ‘But that thing, Comrade Dragosani? It wasn’t — couldn’t be — human. So what was it?’

  Dragosani shook his head. He believed he knew the answer but wouldn’t commit himself now. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘It had been human once, though. One thing is certain: when Keogh needed help it came to him. That’s his talent, Max: the dead answer his call.’ And he turned to the other, his eyes darker still in sunken orbits.

  ‘They answer his call, Max. And there are a lot more of the dead than there are of the living.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  On Thursday morning Harry went back to the river, back to the place where his mother lay once more locked in mud and weed. Except that there were two of them there now, and he had not gone to talk to her but to Viktor Shukshin. He took a cushion from the car and carried it down to the river bank, putting it down in snow six inches deep before seating himself and hugging his knees. Below where he sat the ice had crusted over again and snow had settled on the place where he’d cut his escape hole, so that only an outline showed through.

  After sitting in silence for a while, he said: ‘Stepfather, can you hear me?’

  ‘…Yes,’ came the answer in a little while. ‘Yes, I can hear you, Harry Keogh. I hear you and I feel your presence! Why don’t you go away and leave me in peace?’

  ‘Be careful, Stepfather. Mine might be the last voice you ever hear. If I “go away and leave you in peace”, who’ll speak to you then?’

  ‘So that’s your talent, is it, Harry? You speak to the dead. You’re a corpse rabble-rouser! Well, I want you to know that it hurts me, like all ESP hurts me. But last night, for the first time in many long years, I lay here in my freezing bed and slept soundly, and there was no pain. Who’ll speak to me? I don’t want anyone to speak to me! I want peace.’

  ‘What do you mean, it hurts you?’ Harry pressed. ‘How can my just being here hurt anything?’

  Shukshin told him.

  ‘And that’s why you killed my mother?’

  ‘Yes, and it’s why I tried to kill you. But in your case,

  it might also have served to save my own life.’ And now he told Harry about the men Borowitz had sent to kill him, Dragosani and Batu.

  Harry wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to know it all, from the beginning right to the present. Tell me about it,’ he said, ‘all of it, and I swear I won’t bother you again.’

  And so Shukshin told him.

  About Borowitz and the Chateau Bronnitsy. About the Russian ESPers where they worked for world conquest through ESP in their secret den in the heart of the USSR. He told of how Borowitz had sent him out of Russia to England to find and kill British ESPers, and how he had broken away and become a British citizen. And he told him again about the curse that dogged him: how ESP-talented people rubbed his nerves raw and brought on the madness in him. And at last Harry understood and might almost have pitied Shukshin — were it not for his mother.

  And as Shukshin talked so Harry thought of Sir Keenan Gormley and the British E-Branch, and he remembered his promise to go and see Gormley and perhaps join his group when all of this had been sorted out. Well, now it was sorted out. And now Harry knew that he must go and see Gormley. For Viktor Shukshin wasn’t the only guilty one. There were others far worse than he could ever be. The one who had sent him out on his murderous mission in the first place, for instance. For if Shukshin had never come here, Harry’s mother would still be alive.

  And at last Harry was satisfied. Until now his life had seemed greatly aimless, unfulfilled — his one ambition had been to kill Shukshin — but now he knew that it was bigger than that, and suddenly he felt small in view of the task which still awaited him.

  ‘All right, Stepfather,’ he finally said, I’ll leave you now and let you rest. But it’s a peace you don’t deserve. I can’t and won’t forgive you.’

  ‘I don’t want your forgiveness, Harry Keogh, just your promise that you’ll leave me alone here,’ Shukshin told him. ‘And you’ve given me that. So now go and get yourself killed and let me be.. ‘

  Harry climbed stiffly to his feet. Every bone in his body ached — his head, too — and he felt completely sapped of strength. It was partly physical, but mostly emotional. It was the calm which follows on the storm, and, although he couldn’t yet know it, it was also the lull before the greater storm still to come.

  But now he shrugged himself upright, left the cushion lying there forgotten in the snow, headed back towards his car. Behind him and yet with him a voice said in his mind: ‘Goodbye, Harry.’ But it wasn’t Shukshin’s voice.

  ‘Goodbye, Ma,’ he answered. ‘And thanks. I’ll always love you.’

  ‘And I’ll always love you, Harry.’

  ‘What?’ now came Shukshin’s horrified mental gasp. ‘What! Keogh, what’s this? I saw you raise her up, but — ?’

  Harry didn’t answer. He let Mary Keogh do it for him:

  ‘Hello, Viktor. No, you’re wrong. Harry didn’t raise me up. I raised myself up. For the sake of love, which is something you can’t understand. But that’s over now and I’ll not do it again. My Harry has others to look after him now; so I’ll just lie here, lonely in the mud. Except maybe it won’t be so lonely now…’

  ‘Keogh!’ Shukshin frantically called out after Harry again. ‘Keogh, you promised me — you said you were the only one who could talk to me. But now she is talking to me — and she hurts me most of all!’

  Harry kept on walking.

  ‘Now, now, Viktor,’ he heard his mother’s answer, as if she spoke to a small child. ‘That will get you nowhere. Did you say you want peace and quiet? Oh, but you’ll soon get bored with peace and quiet, Viktor.’

  ‘Keogh!’ Shukshin’s voice was a diminishing mental shriek now. ‘Keogh, you have to get me out of this. Dig me up — tell them where to find my body — only don’t leave me here with her!’

  ‘Actually, Viktor,’ Mary Keogh remorselessly continued, ‘I think I’ll rather enjoy talking to you. You’re so close to me here that it’s no effort at all!’

  ‘Keogh, you bastard! Come back! Oh… please…. come… back!’

  But Harry kept on walking.

  By 1:30 p.m. Harry was back in Hartlepool. The roads were nightmarish, layered with compacted snow for more than half the journey, so that in the main he was driving on his nerves. This only served to drain more of his strength, and when at last he got home it was as much as he could do to drag himself upstairs.

  Brenda, his wife of eight weeks, was bright and chirpy about the flat, which had undergone some fantastic and inexplicable metamorphosis since she had moved in after their registry office wedding. She was less than three months pregnant but already blooming. Harry, too, had been in fine fettle when last she had seen him; but now, in complete contrast -

  He barely managed the effort of kissing her on the cheek, was asleep almost before his head hit the pillows.

  He had been away for three days, doing ‘research’, she knew, for a new book he was planning — what and where exactly he’d never bothered to say. Well, that was Harry and she should be used to it by now — but she was not used to him turning up looking like he’d spent three days in a concentration camp!

  After he had slept right through the afternoon and seemed to have developed a fever, she called a doctor who visited at about 8:00 p.m. Harry didn’t bother to wake up for his visit; the doctor thought it might be

  pneumonia, though the symptoms weren’t quite right; he left pills, instructions and his telephone number. If Harry got worse during the night, especially if his breathing became irregular or he started coughing, or if his temperature went up appreciably, Brenda was to call him at once.

  But Harry got no worse through the night, and in the morning he was able to have a bite of breakfast, following which he engaged Brenda in a peculiar, guarded conversation which she was dismayed to find as depressing and morbid as any talk she’d ever had with him during his gloomy or morose periods of previous, less happy ti
mes. After listening to him for a little while, when he began to talk about making a will leaving everything to her, or to their child in the event she was unable to make use of it, then she rounded on him and laughed out loud.

  ‘Harry,’ she said, taking his hands where he sat on the edge of the bed with his shoulders slumped, ‘what is this all about? I know you’ve had a bug of some sort or other and that you’re still feeling low, and I know that when you’re a bit down in the mouth it really seems like the end of the world to you, but here we are married for just eight weeks and you sound as if you expect to be dead by the spring! Yes, and me shortly after! I’ve never heard anything so silly! Just a week ago you were swimming, fighting, skating, full of life — so what is it that’s suddenly bothering you?’

  At that he decided he really couldn’t hedge any longer. Anyway she was his wife now and it was only right that she should know. And so he sat her down and told her everything, with the exception of his dream of the tombstones, and of course excluding the death of Viktor Shukshin. He passed off his aggressive ‘exercising’ of the past few months as simply a means of ensuring his fitness for work still to come, work which could well prove dangerous; which in turn led him to speak of the British ESP organisation, but not in any depth. It was sufficient

  she should know that he wasn’t the only strangely talented person — that in fact there were many more — and that there were foreign powers ranged against the free world who were not above using such talents to its detriment. Part of Harry’s work with the organisation would be to ensure that these alien powers failed in their objectives; his talent as a necroscope would be used as a weapon against them; the future therefore seemed at best… uncertain. His talk of wills and such had been simply an expression of this uncertainty: he thought it was best to be prepared for any eventuality.

  Even telling her all of this — and while not being too specific on any point — still he wondered if perhaps he was making a mistake, if it would have been better to keep her entirely in the dark. And he wondered at his own motives: was he really confiding in her in order to prepare her for… for whatever? Or was it that she was right, that he was feeling at a low ebb and so needed someone to share the load?

  Or there again, was it guilt? He had a course to run now and must pursue it; the chase was not at an end; Shukshin had merely been a faltering step in the right direction. Did he feel that because he chose to go in that direction Brenda was at risk? The dream epitaph — his mother’s warning — had said nothing about Brenda dying as a result of anything Harry was yet to do. He had impregnated her, yes, which would result in a birth; but how could any course he took now influence the physical event of the birth itself? And yet a nagging voice in the back of his mind told him that indeed it could.

  And so it seemed to him that his motive for telling her was chiefly one of guilt, and also because he needed to tell someone — needed to tell a friend. The trouble was that he seemed to be leaning on the very one he endangered, which aggravated and magnified the guilt aspect out of all proportion!

  It was all very confusing and abstruse, and trying to muddle through it made him more tired than ever, so that when he was done talking he was glad to sit back and let her think it over.

  Strangely, she accepted everything he said almost as a matter of course — indeed with visible relief — and at once set about to explain why:

  ‘Harry, I know I’m not as clever as you, but I’m not stupid either. I’ve known there was something in the air ever since you told me that story of yours — about the necroscope. I sort of sensed that you hadn’t finished it, that you wanted to say more but you were scared to. Also, there’ve been times up in Harden when Mr Hannant has stopped me and asked after you. The way he talked, I knew he thought there was something strange about you, too…’

  ‘Hannant?’ he frowned suspiciously. ‘What did he — ?’

  ‘Oh, nothing to be concerned about. In fact I think he’s more than a little frightened of you. Harry, I’ve listened to you talking to your poor dead Ma in your sleep, and I knew you were holding real conversations! And there were so many other things. Your writing, for instance. I mean, how come you were suddenly a brilliant author? I’ve read your stories, Harry, and they’re not you. Oh, they’re wonderful stories, all right, but you just aren’t that wonderful! Not the real you. The real you is ordinary, Harry. Oh, I love you — of course I do — but I’m nobody’s fool. And your swimming, your skating, your Judo? Did you think I’d believe you were a super man? I promise you it’s easier to believe you’re a necroscope! It’s a relief to know the truth, Harry. I’m glad you’ve finally told me…’

  Harry shook his head in open astonishment. Talk about level-headed…!

  Finally he said: ‘But I haven’t told you everything, love.’

  ‘Oh, I know that,’ she answered. ‘Of course you haven’t! If you’re to be working for your country, why obviously there’ll be things you need to keep secret — even from me. I understand that, Harry.’

  It was as if someone had lifted a great weight off his

  chest. He breathed deeply, lay back again, let his head

  link into his pillows. ‘Brenda, I’m still very tired,’ he

  yawned. ‘Just let me sleep now, there’s a love. Tomorrow

  I’m to go down to London.’

  ‘All right, my love,’ she leaned over him to kiss his forehead. ‘And don’t worry, I won’t ask you to tell me a thing about it.’

  Harry slept right through until evening, then got up and ate a meal. They went out about 8:00 p.m. just to walk for an hour in the crisp night air, until Brenda started to feel the cold. Then they hurried home, took hot showers, and made love, and afterwards both of them slept right through the night.

  It was the least Harry had done in any single day in his life.

  Later he would have reason to recall it as the most wasteful day in his life.

  Sir Keenan Gormley was thoughtful as he left ESP HQ, took the lift down to the tiny lobby and went out into the cold London night. Several things had given him cause for concern just recently, not the least of them being Harry Keogh. For Keogh had not yet contacted him, and with each day that passed Gormley felt the time weighing on him like lumps of lead. It was just after nine o’clock as Gormley walked the streets heading for Westminster tube station, and two hundred and twenty-five miles away Harry Keogh himself was just making love to his wife before settling to a night’s sleep.

  As for Gormley’s other causes for concern: there were two of them. One was the way his second in command

  kept enquiring after his health, which might seem silly if his second in command weren’t Alec Kyle, and if Alec Kyle wasn’t a very talented seer, a man whose by no means negligible talent lay in foretelling the future! Kyle’s concern for his boss over the last week or ten days had been pretty obvious, no matter how carefully he’d tried to hide it. If there was anything specific, Gormley knew that Kyle would tell him. That was why he hadn’t pressed him about it, but it was worrying anyway.

  And finally there was the other thing, the big thing. Over the period of the last six or seven weeks there had been at least a dozen different occasions when Gormley had known that there were ESPers about, when he’d ‘spotted’ them in his mind. He had never come face to face with one, had never been able to pin one down, but he’d known they were there anyway. At least two of them.

  It had got so he could recognise them almost as easily as he recognised his own men, but these were not his men. Their auras were strange. And always they watched him from the safety of crowds, in the busy places, never where he could tie a face to a feeling. He wondered how long they would go on watching, and if that was all they would do. And as he reached the underground and went down to the trains he patted the bulge of his 9 mm Browning through his overcoat and jacket. At least that was a comfort. There wasn’t an ESPer in the world who could think himself out of the way of a bullet — not that Gormley knew of, anyway…

&nb
sp; There were only a few people on the platform and fewer in the compartment where Gormley picked up a discarded copy of the Daily Mail to keep him company during the journey. He found it mildly alarming that the headlines seemed completely alien to him. Was he really that much out of touch? Yes, he probably was! His work had been putting a lot of strain on him and taking up far

  too much of his time; this was the third night in a row he’d worked late; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d really read a book right through or entertained friends. Maybe Kyle was right to be concerned about him — and on a purely personal level at that — not from the point of view of an ESPer. Maybe it was time he took a break and left his second in command to mind the shop. God only knew he would have to sooner or later. And he made himself a promise that he would take a break… just as soon as he’d initiated young Harry Keogh into the fold.

  Keogh…

  Gormley had given a lot of thought to Keogh, had considered some of the ways his talent might be put to use. Fantastic ways. All in the mind for now, but fascinating anyway. He would have started to go over them again, but just as it crossed his mind to do so the train pulled into St James’s and Gormley found himself distracted by an incredibly pretty pair of legs in a tiny skirt that passed directly in front of his eyes and out of the twin doors. It was a wonder the lovely creature didn’t freeze to death, he thought — and wouldn’t that be a loss!

  Gormley grinned at his own thoughts. His wife, God bless her, was always complaining he had an eye for the girls. Well, his heart might be tricky but the rest of him seemed to be in working order. An eye wouldn’t be all he had for that young lady, if he were thirty years younger!

  He coughed loudly, returned to his newspaper and tried to get himself reacquainted with the world. A brave effort but he lost interest half-way down the second column. It was pretty mundane stuff, after all, compared with his world. A world of fortune-tellers, telepaths, and now a necroscope.