by Brian Lumley
“B.J.,” he sighed and wrapped his arms around her. But as he hugged her, so she felt him tense up again, felt the relief, the tenderness, the welcome, turning to something else.
“Harry, what is it?” Her eyes were as wide and staring as his had been just a moment earlier. But now, as he pushed her away, held her at arm’s length, and looked at her as if he were trying to look right through her, those oh-so-deep eyes of his had narrowed to become part of a frown, or even an accusation.
“What is it?” he repeated her. “Maybe you can tell me. And B.J., this time I do mean tell me!” Catching her wrist, he half dragged her along the corridor, past the front room, stairwell, and kitchen, to his study—where she saw what it was.
“Zahanine!” It came out of her as a wail, a very small cry, a gasp. “Oh, Zahanine!” Then she was down on her knees, fluttering her hands inches over the body—wanting to touch it here, there, everywhere—and touching it nowhere.
“I got in fifteen minutes ago,” the Necroscope lied. “This is what I found.” He got down beside B.J., and at last was able to look at the body and see more than blood. “She was shot, and—I don’t know, tortured, raped?—before she was beheaded. But why, B.J.? Why? And I know you know! Oh, I’m sure you’re an innocent, wrong-headed but innocent, but you do know what’s going on here. And you have to tell me.”
“Harry, I—”
“This is why you wanted me out of the way, right? Because something like this could have happened to me?”
“Harry—”
“Yellow men,” he stood up, pulled B.J. up with him. “What about the Asiatics? Tell me about them.” (For if she could, it might also explain how those red-robed “monks” fitted into his future: some connection with the device they’d planted in Hyde Park? It seemed more than likely. But if they were also responsible for what had happened here, then they most certainly had a place in his future … or would have when he caught up with them!)
But why this aching sensation deep inside? This burgeoning feeling of something waiting to cut loose, like a word on the tip of his tongue that try as he might he couldn’t remember. Was it simply the need for action, revenge, justice? … Or something else?
“Harry!” B.J. snapped, trying to pull him out of it. But:
“No!” he snapped back. “Tell me now, B.J.!” He was angry; angry and impatient; his lips were tight, showing a narrow bar of gritted teeth.
B.J. saw the warning signals, reading them like a threat in his eyes, his voice and attitude. Tilting her head a little—perhaps warningly in her own right, maybe even threateningly—“Haaarrry,”she began to growl …
… And he gasped, reached to cover her mouth with a hand. But too late, as B.J. finished in something of panic: “Mah wee man!”
The moon … the wolf’s head … the howling! And at last the calm, descending like a blanket over his troubled mind.
Harry blinked, and the anger, the questions, and the fear went out of him. For B.J. was here to put things back in order again. And she did, by telling him, “It’s OK,” Harry,” and by hugging him to stop him reeling and maybe falling. “Sit down.”
He blinked again, shook his head, waited for her to go on as he obeyed her and sat in his chair by the desk. “It will be … OK,” she said again, trying to believe it herself. “But, oh, where’ve you been?” And before he could answer: “No, never mind that now. Just let me think.” She had come within an inch of learning the truth, his truth at least, and by her own command had thrown it away.
B.J. looked at the body on the floor, its head beneath the desk at Harry’s feet, and grimaced. And almost or wholly to herself: “They were making sure,” she said.
He wondered, Of what? But inside knew of what. Except that couldn’t be because B.J. and her girls were innocent. How could they be … what she was suggesting they were, when she herself wasn’t? He reeled again, swaying in his chair, and B.J. saw her mistake.
“Making sure she was dead,” she told him. “That she wasn’t going to be able to talk to anyone about … about this.”
Oh, really? Well, the Necroscope knew someone who Zahanine could talk to about it. But he couldn’t or wouldn’t—and certainly not while B.J. was here. And still he said nothing.
B.J. looked at him and it was as if she were here on her own, or at best with a zombie. But that was all her own doing, too. “You can talk,” she said. “Talk normally. Tell me what I should do!”
A new twist. He should tell her what to do! But it was a genuine appeal, to Harry and not to what she’d made him. “Turn me loose,” he said, with that certain something in his voice.
She looked at him, and he was no longer the zombie. He had that look: like the first time she had seen him, or in the Spey Valley when they had killed those Drakuls. The Mysterious One—Radu’s Man-With-Two-Faces. Mysterious because he’d been trained to be that way, by these people he’d worked for, this E-Branch. A man with two faces, yes. The one face a mask, to obscure the true nature of the one underneath. The face of a killer in the name of justice.
And now Harry was asking to be turned loose in the name of Bonnie Jean, or more properly in the name of Radu. And why not? For she had told him it might come to this, hadn’t she? But no, she would not, dare not put him in that kind of danger, not her Harry. And not when there were so many greater dangers ahead—for both of them.
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” she told him.
(But he did! Oh, he did! Only ask me! he screamed, however silently. For he couldn’t tell her what he knew until she asked him! And even then he could never tell her how he knew, because that would be to endanger his secrets.)
B.J. saw the sweat break out on Harry’s face and actually heard his teeth grating. It was something she’d noticed before in times of stress, and she thought: His mind is stuck in neutral where I’ve jammed the gears! He knows we must do something, but can only act on my command.
“Zahanine,” she said. “We can’t let her be found here like this. The Drakuls did this. They could be on a phone somewhere speaking to the police even now. They could be trying to corner me—or you, or us—and startle us to flight, cut down on our options. Then, when we run, they’ll be right on our heels knowing where we’re running to. Do you understand?”
“To Radu,” he nodded.
“We have to get rid of Zahanine!” B.J.’s hand flew to her mouth. “I mean, we have to get her out of here. But I can’t—damn it—can’t think! Zahanine thought it was you last night, but it was them. And I sent her here—she came here—of her own free will …” She was rambling; for one of only a very few times in her too-long life, B.J. knew she was actually panicking. “Harry, I don’t know what to do with Zahanine! And her car is parked down the service road near the bridge! What can we do with her, and the car? Do you know of anywhere we can … dump them? I mean—do you know any fucking thing?” She grabbed hold of his collar, shook his head to and fro. “Do you have a single fucking suggestion?”
These were direct questions and he could answer them normally. And yes, he did know somewhere, and he did have some suggestions. “You get out of here,” he said. “Right now, and leave this to me. But first tell me where to find you. Then, when I’m done, I’ll join you.”
Just like that, delivered like a right to the jaw so that she jerked back from him, her eyes wide, wild and disbelieving. There were depths here she still hadn’t explored, still didn’t understand. Harry got to his feet. “Where are you staying?”
She told him: the place where he and she had breakfasted, the first time they had gone climbing together, a roadside pub this side of Falkirk. “They have rooms. The girls and I, we’re supposed to be doing a local survey, a census of people living in the area. But most of the time they’ve been out looking for you. You’re a hard man to find, Harry Keogh. And a hard one to follow. A hard act to follow, too.”
Yes he was, and he’d said he could handle this. Which was just as well because right now B.J. didn’t feel she co
uld handle much of anything. “Will you need help?” She could at least make the effort. For him. For them.
He shook his head. “You go. I’ll follow as soon as I can.”
“I’m going to turn you off now, Harry,” she said. “But you will remember what you have to do—the things you do so well—and where to find me when they’re done.”
“B.J.,” he said, and held her tightly while she whispered in his ear:
“Harry, mah wee man …”
It was like waking up from a bad dream to a worse one. But B.J. had gone and the Necroscope knew what he had to do.
He placed Zahanine’s head and the cleaver on the throw rug with her body, rolled the rug up and tied its ends with string, finally rolled the whole bundle again in a sheet of clear plastic packaging from the new carpeting in his bedroom. There was a place he knew where Zahanine would never be found. Or if she was, it wouldn’t much matter.
Then he brought a carpet from the front room to cover the dark spot on the floor, and made a final check of the house to see if there was anything he’d missed. But no, the place would seem absolutely normal to anyone who didn’t know better.
But Harry did know better, and there was a certain smell that the draught from the broken patio windows was having difficulty dispersing. Or maybe it was only in his mind. In any case, he used a deodorant spray which seemed to help a little.
Then he called a handyman he knew in Bonnyrig and told him about the damage to the window. “I won’t be here,” he said. “So I’ll leave the front door locked. You’ll have to go to the back of the house on the river’s side, and get in through the garden gate. When you’re done, leave the patio doors secured.” As simple as that. And then the difficult bit.
Harry went to Zahanine’s car; the keys were in the ignition and he was able to drive it back to the house. Back indoors he put a penknife in his pocket, hoisted the rolled-up rug and its contents to his shoulder, (it seemed to weigh half a ton!) took it out to the car and placed it as gently as possible in the boot.
All done, he checked that no one was about, which wasn’t likely for in this place no one ever was about. And the “highway”—which was in fact a country road, and the only vantage point—was on the other side of the river on the far side of the house.
Finally, satisfied that he was alone, unobserved, he got back in the car and drove it very slowly forward in first gear. And as he drove, he set familiar Möbius equations rolling down the screen of his metaphysical mind, to conjure a broad, squat door directly in front of the car—
—And drove through it!
Moments later he vacated the Continuum on the Roof of the World, the Tingri Plateau, Tibet … In a snowstorm!
The car stalled at once, sank through a frozen crust into a deep drift, gradually settled on compacting snow. Harry wound down his window, slid out backwards onto the crust of snow, and flailed through the drift and the blizzard to the boot. Already feeling the intense cold, he dragged the bundle out and cut it open, then propped Zahanine against the back of the car.
It was cold, so terribly cold, but the Necroscope knew she couldn’t feel it. And he hadn’t wanted to leave her locked away like that, in the stifling dark. The darkness of death, when at last she had accepted it, would be bad enough.
But just looking at her he knew it wasn’t right. Zahanine wasn’t complete. And shuddering—also from the cold—he took her head and placed it on the neck. In another minute it would be frozen there.
And he would be frozen here, if he didn’t get moving!
But first—
—There was something he must do. And somehow the sheer desolation, the utter isolation of the place, helped him to do it. Not a conversation with Zahanine, no (Harry doubted if she would be ready for that a while, and he certainly wasn’t), but he did know what would be on her mind. And here in this place—this icy, windswept, nowhere place—he dropped his mental barriers to let a different kind of cold come creeping in.
She would feel his warmth and know it for life. She would huddle to it, a frightened mouse. And in that moment the darkness would recede a little and Zahanine would remember. Cruel? Perhaps, but not as cruel as what had happened to her. For the Necroscope didn’t know (or wouldn’t accept) what she had been, only what she was now—a lonely, frightened dead thing, foresaken of life.
And he was right. Her whimper came to him and the feel of her wraith’s arms around him, like the Little Match Girl crushing to the tiny bonfire of her own worthless matches to draw a last ounce of warmth from it. But he wasn’t afraid, not of the girl. This was what he was, after all, and what he had used to do; and with the exception of his lost son he was the only one who could do it. He was life and she knew it, which caused her to remember her own life and how it had ended. And the Necroscope was witness to it:
The slant-eyed, lustful yellow face leering down on her, and the feel of his cold member in her. Then his eyes widening and the look on his face changing, as she reached up trembling hands to it; the feel of his skin caught up under her scraping fingernails, and torn away in ten red stripes!
And then this: the endless darkness that Harry had woken her up to. So that now Zahanine knew for sure. That beyond any shadow of a doubt, she was—
—But no! The Necroscope didn’t want to hear it, what he had heard so often before. That sudden tortured shriek of denial. And he brought the barriers crashing down on his mind so fast that it unbalanced him, sent him staggering back from the half-buried car, stumbling on frozen legs.
But he had seen what he’d needed to see: confirmation of her murderer, and now all he wanted was to be out of here …
It was still only 8:50 A.M. in London, in the disused dockside warehouse with its loading bay that jutted out over the river, where Dr. James Anderson had spent the last terrified, agonized week of his life and slow death. But his torment was over now, and his vampire torturers were still baffled.
“You should have left it to me,” the Francezci told his thralls, Jimmy Nicosia and Frank Potenza. “What, did you think you were still under orders from Vincent? Did you think you were the Mob? You’re mine, mine and Anthony’s. You’re Francezcis! And this … isn’t us.” Shaking his head, he gloomed over the mess that had been a man. “It’s simple butchery. And worse, it served no purpose. You got nothing out of him.”
“Er, something. We got something, Francesco,” Jimmy Nicosia tried hard not to grovel. “And we didn’t have much choice. We couldn’t be here twenty-four hours a day, not and keep an eye on these E-Branch types. And that in itself is a problem. You follow those guys—you look at some of them for too long—sooner or later they turn and look right back at you! These people are something else, Francesco. Not the kind you’d want to mess with.”
“There isn’t any kind I can’t mess with!” the Francesci snarled. “But … I take your point. I’ve heard the same sort of thing before, and from people who are supposed to know what they’re doing! That’s why we picked this Anderson.” He glanced again at the remains of a man. “He isn‘t—wasn’t—part of their organization, just someone they used.”
“But not any more,” Frank Potenza whispered, smiling his wide-mouthed, emotionless yet oddly girlish smile. All of the Francezci’s displeasure had been wasted on him.
Francesco scowled at him, but knew it was useless to do more than that. Despite (or maybe because of) Potenza’s androgynous nature, he was muscle with very little of mind. He was simply weird; he knew how to whittle flesh but nothing of terror’s true subtleties. Therefore pointless to punish him; you might as well kick a pet cat. He wouldn’t understand but would simply lash out at you, claw you—and then you’d have to kill him. It was best to ignore him, which Francesco did by turning again to Nicosia.
“OK, I accept that this was an accident. You sought to slow Anderson down—to stop him trying to escape, and weaken his mental resistance—by weakening him physically. But you went too far. Still, as you say, you did get something. So go over it again, ever
ything he told you.”
“Four years ago,” Nicosia began, “E-Branch called him in to hypnotize this Harry Keogh character—or the one they call Harry Keogh. He was to restrict Keogh’s ‘talents’—don’t ask me what talents—so that when Keogh left the Branch he couldn’t be put to use by any other organization. All Anderson knew was that Keogh was hot stuff. Darcy Clarke, Head of Branch, and all the other weird fucks thought very highly of him. But they didn’t want him doing whatever it was he did for anyone else.” He gave a shrug, fell silent.
“And that’s it?” Francesco was baffled, or maybe not.
“Until a week ago. Then Clarke contacted Anderson again, told him to come on in, take a look at Keogh. It was then that we saw them all together for the first time—Anderson, Clarke, Trask, and Keogh. And when they split up we took our chance and got a hold of Anderson. It seemed the right thing to do … not just because we’d been told to do it but because plainly Anderson and Keogh knew each other, or why would they be in company with each other?”
The Francezci nodded. “You were told to pick him up—not to kill him! Anyway, what about Anderson taking a look at this Keogh? What was that all about? What was he looking for?”
Nicosia shrugged. “Clarke was worried that Anderson’s hypnosis—what he’d done to Keogh the first time, four years ago—had gone too deep. He wanted Anderson’s opinion, and also to know if it was reversible. Anderson told him it was, and that he would go back that night and fix it.”
“Give him back these special talents?”
“Yeah, I suppose. But he didn’t, because we had him.”
“But still no mention of what these skills were?”
“Francesco, we tried!” Nicosia threw up his hands. “Hell, you can see how we tried! But Anderson didn’t know. I swear it. He’d never known in the first place!”
And Francesco growled, “That’s the bit that kills it. He didn’t fucking know! Well maybe he did know, but it was so big he would go through all of this to hide it!” And again he glanced at the debris of a man. But in fact he suspected that Nicosia was right. No man would be capable of suffering a fraction of this without talking his head off … if he had anything to talk about. As for Kyle’s or Keogh’s talents: maybe Francesco already knew what they’d been and what they still might be.
