Deadspawn Read online

  Clarke stared directly into the black, enigmatic lenses of the other’s glasses. “You’re the one who showed us how, Harry,” he said.

  Harry smiled his sad smile again, and apparently casually—but Clarke suspected very deliberately—reached up a hand and took off his glasses. Not for a moment turning his face away, he folded the glasses and put them into his pocket. And:

  “Well?” he said.

  Clarke’s jaw fell open as he backed off a stumbling pace, barely managing to contain the sigh—of relief—which he felt welling inside. Caught off balance (again), he looked into the other’s perfectly normal, unwavering brown eyes and said: “Eh? What? Well?”

  “Well, where are we going?” Harry answered with a shrug. “Or are we already there?”

  Clarke gathered his wits. “We’re there,” he said, “almost.”

  He led the way down stone steps and under an arch, then through a heavy door into a stone-flagged corridor. As they emerged into the corridor, a Military Policeman came erect and saluted. Clarke didn’t correct his error, merely nodded, led Harry past him. Halfway along the corridor a middle-aged man—unmistakably a policeman for all that he wore civilian clothing—guarded an iron-banded door of oak.

  Again Clarke’s nod, and the plainclothesman swung the door open for him and stepped aside.

  “Now we’re there,” Harry preempted Clarke, causing him to close his mouth on those selfsame words, unspoken. Harry Keogh needed no one to tell him there was a dead person close by. And with one more glance at the Necroscope, Clarke ushered him inside. The officer didn’t follow them but closed the door quietly behind them.

  The room was cool; two walls were of natural stone; a rocky outcrop of volcanic gneiss grew out of the stone-flagged floor in one corner and into the walls there. Built straight onto the rock, this place was a storeroom. Steel shelving was stacked on one side. On the other, beside the cold stone wall: a surgical trolley with a body on it, and a white rubber sheet covering the body.

  The Necroscope wasted no time. The dead held no terrors for Harry Keogh. If he had as many friends among the living, then he’d be the most loved man in the world. He was the most loved man, but the ones who loved him couldn’t tell anyone about it. Except Harry himself.

  He went to the trolley, drew back the rubber sheet from the face, closed his eyes, and rocked back on his heels. She had been sweet and young and innocent—yes, another innocent—and she had been tormented. And she still was. Her eyes were closed now, but Harry knew that if they were open he’d read terror in them. He could feel those dead eyes burning through the pale lids that covered them, crying out to him in their horror.

  She would need comforting. The teeming dead—the Great Majority—would have tried, but they didn’t always get it right. Their voices were often mournful, ghostly, frightening, to anyone who didn’t know them. In the darkness of death they could seem like night visitants, nightmares, like wailing banshees come to steal a soul. She might think she was dreaming, might even suspect that she was dying, but not that she was already dead. That took time to sink in, and the freshly dead were usually the last to know. That was because they were the least able to accept it. Especially the very young, whose young minds had not yet properly considered it.

  But on the other hand, if she had actually seen death coming—if she had read it in the eyes of her destroyer, felt the numbing blow, or the hands on her throat, closing off the air, or the cutting edge of the instrument of her destruction, slicing into her flesh—then she would know. And she’d be cold and afraid and tearful. Tearful, yes, for no one knew better than Harry how the dead could cry.

  He hesitated, wasn’t sure how best to approach her, not even sure if he should approach her, not now. For Harry knew that she’d been pure, and that he was impure. True, her flesh was heading for corruption even now, but there’s corruption and there’s corruption …

  Angrily, he thrust the thought aside. No, he wasn’t a defiler. Not yet. He was a friend. He was the only friend. He was the Necroscope.

  Be that as it may, when he put his hand on her clay-cold brow she recoiled as from a serpent! Not physically, for she was dead, but her mind cringed, shrank down, withdrew into itself like the feathery fronds of some strange sea anemone brushed by a swimmer. Harry felt his blood turn to ice and for a moment stood in horror of himself. The last thing he’d wanted was to frighten her more yet. He wrapped her in his thoughts, in what had once been the warmth of his deadspeak:

  It’s all right! Don’t be afraid! I won’t hurt you! No one can ever hurt you again! It was as easy as that. Without even trying, he’d told her that she was dead. But in the next moment he knew that she had already known:

  KEEP OFF! Her deadspeak was a sobbing shriek of torment in Harry’s mind. GET AWAY FROM ME, YOU FILTHY … THING!

  As if someone had touched him with naked electric wires, Harry jerked where he stood beside her, jerked and shuddered as he relived, with her, the girl’s last moments. Her last living, breathing moments, but not the last things she had known. For in certain mercifully rare circumstances—and at the command of certain monstrous men—even dead flesh can be made to feel again.

  In a nightmarishly subliminal sequence, a series of flickering, kaleidoscopic, vividly ghastly pictures flashed on the screen of the Necroscope’s metaphysical mind and then was gone. But afterimages remained, and Harry knew that these wouldn’t go away so easily; indeed, that they would probably remain for a long time. He knew it as surely as he now knew what he was dealing with, because he’d dealt with such a thing before.

  That one’s name had been … Dragosani!

  This one, this poor girl’s murderer, had been like that—like Dragosani, a necromancer—but in one especially hideous respect he’d been worse than that. For not even Dragosani had raped his corpse victims!

  But it’s over now, he told the girl. He can’t come back. You’re safe now.

  He felt the shuddering of her thoughts receding, replaced by the natural curiosity of her incorporeal mind. She wanted to know him, but for the moment felt afraid to know anything. She wanted, too, to know her condition, except that was probably the most frightening thing of all. But in her own small way she was brave, and she had to know for sure.

  Am I … (her deadspeak voice was no longer a shriek but a shivery tremor). Am I really … ?

  Yes, you are. Harry nodded, and knew that she’d sense the movement even as all the teeming dead sensed his every mood and motion. But … (he stumbled), I mean … it could be worse!

  He’d been through all of this before, too often, and it never got any easier. How do you convince someone recently dead that it could be worse? “Your body will rot and worms will devour it, but your mind will go on. Oh, you won’t see anything—it will always be dark, and you’ll never touch or taste or smell anything again—but it could be worse. Your parents and loved ones will cry over your grave and plant flowers there, seeking to visualize in their blooms something of your face and form; but you won’t know they’re there or be able to speak to them and say, ‘Here I am!’ You won’t be able to reassure them that ‘it could be worse.’”

  This was Harry’s expression of grief, meant to be private, but his thoughts were deadspeak. She heard and felt them and knew him for a friend. And:

  You’re the Necroscope, she said then. They tried to tell me about you but I was afraid and wouldn’t listen. When they spoke to me I turned away. I didn’t want to … to talk to dead people.

  Harry was crying. Great tears blurred his vision, rolled down his pale, slightly hollow cheeks, splashed hot where they fell on his hand on her brow. He hadn’t wanted to cry, didn’t know he could, but there was that in him which worked on his feelings and amplified them, lifting them above the emotions of ordinary men. Safe—so long as it worked on an emotion such as this one, which was grief and entirely human.

  Darcy Clarke had come forward; he touched the Necroscope’s arm. “Harry?”

  Harry shook him off, and hi
s voice was choked but harsh, too, as he rasped: “Leave us alone! I want to talk to her in private.”

  Clarke backed off, his Adam’s apple bobbing. It was the look on Harry’s face that brought tears to his eyes, too. “Of course,” he said. He turned and left the room, and closed the door after him.

  Harry took a metal-framed chair from beside the stacked shelving and sat by the dead girl. He very carefully cradled her head in his arms.

  I … I can feel that, she said wonderingly.

  “Then you can feel, too, that I’m not like him,” Harry answered out loud. He preferred simply to talk to the dead, for that way it came more naturally to him.

  Most of her terror had fled now. The Necroscope was a comfort; he was warm, a safe haven. It might even be her father stroking her face. Except she wouldn’t be able to feel him. Only Harry Keogh could touch the dead. Only Harry, and—

  Her terror welled up again—but he was quick to sense it and fend it off:

  “It’s over and you’re safe. We won’t—I won’t—let anything hurt you again, ever.” It was more than just a promise, it was his vow.

  In a little while her thoughts grew calm and she was easy, or easier, again. But she was very bitter, too, when she said: I’m dead, but he—that thing—is alive!

  “It’s one of the reasons I’m here,” Harry told her. “For you weren’t the only one. There were others before you, and unless we stop him there’ll be others after you. So you see, it’s very important that we get him, for he’s not just a murderer but also a necromancer; which makes him more, far worse, than the sum of his parts. A murderer destroys the living, and a necromancer torments the dead. But this one enjoys the terror of his victim both before and after they die!”

  I can’t talk about what he did to me, she said, shuddering.

  Harry shook his head. “You don’t have to. Right now I’m only interested in you. I’m sure there’ll be people worrying about you. Until we know who you are, we won’t be able to put their minds at rest.”

  Do you think their minds will ever be at rest, Harry?

  It was a good question. “We don’t have to tell them everything,” he answered. “I might be able to fix it so that they only know, well, that someone killed you. They don’t have to be told how.”

  Can you do that?

  “If that’s the way you want it,” he said.

  Then do it! She offered a breathless sigh. That was the worst, Harry: thinking about them, my folks, how they’d take it. But if you can make it easier for them … I think I’m beginning to understand why the dead love you so. My name is Penny. Penny Sanderson. And I live—lived—at …

  … And so it went. She told the Necroscope all about herself, and he remembered every smallest detail. That was what Darcy Clarke had wanted, but it wasn’t everything he’d wanted. When finally Penny Sanderson was through, Harry knew he still had to take her that one step further.

  “Penny, listen,” he said. “I don’t want you to do or say anything. Don’t try to talk to me at all. But like I said before, this is important.”

  About him?

  “Penny, when I first touched you, and you thought it was him come back for more, you remembered how it was. Parts of it, anyway. You thought about it in brief flashes of memory. That was deadspeak and I picked it up. But it was all very chaotic, kaleidoscopic.”

  But that’s all there is, she said. That’s how it was.

  Harry nodded. “Okay, that’s fine, but I need to see it again. See, the better I remember it, the more chance I have of finding him. So really you don’t have to tell me anything, not as a conscious act. I just want to shoot a few words at you, at which you’ll picture the bits I need. Do you understand?”

  Word association?

  “Something like that, yes. Except of course that in this case the association will be hell for you—but easier than just talking about it.”

  She understood; Harry sensed her willingness; before she could change her mind, he said:

  “Knife!”

  A picture hit the screen of his mind like a mixture of blood and acid! The blood incensed him and the acid burned, etching the picture there for good this time. Harry reeled before her horror—which was unbearable—and if he hadn’t been seated would have fallen. The shock was that physical, even though it lasted only a fraction of a second.

  When she stopped sobbing he said, “Are you okay?”

  No … yes.

  “Face!” Harry fired at her.

  Face?

  “His face?” he tried again.

  And a face, red, leering, bloated with lust, with an open, salivating mouth and eyes insensate as frozen diamonds, went skittering across the Necroscope’s mind’s eye. But not so fast that he didn’t catch it. And this time she wasn’t sobbing. She wanted this to work. Wanted him brought to justice.

  “Where?”

  A picture of … a car park? A motorway restaurant? Darkness pierced with points of light. A string of cars and lorries, speeding down three lanes, with oncoming lights whose glare momentarily blinded. And windscreen wipers swinging left, right, left, right, left …

  But there was no pain in the last and Harry guessed that wasn’t where it had happened. No, it had been where it started to happen, probably where she met him.

  “He picked you up in a car?”

  A rain-blurred picture of an ice-blue screen with white letters superimposed or printed there: FRID or FRIG? The screen had many wheels and puffed exhaust smoke. It was the way she remembered it. A large vehicle? A lorry? Articulated?

  “Penny,” Harry said, “I have to do this—only this time I don’t mean where you met him:

  “Where?!”

  Ice! Bitter cold! Dark! The whole place softly vibrating or throbbing! And dead things everywhere, hanging from hooks! Harry tried to fix it all in his mind but nothing was clear, only her shock and disbelief that this was happening to her.

  She was sobbing again, terrified, and Harry knew that he’d soon have to stop; he couldn’t bring himself to hurt her any more. But at the same time he knew he mustn’t weaken now.

  “Death!” he snapped, hating himself.

  And it was the knife scene all over again, and Harry knew he was losing her, could feel her withdrawing. Before that could happen:

  “And … afterwards?” (God!—he didn’t want to know! He didn’t want to know!)

  Penny Sanderson screamed, and screamed, and screamed!

  But the Necroscope got his picture.

  And wished he hadn’t bothered …

  2

  UPON THEIR BACKS, TO BITE ’EM …

  Harry stayed with her for a further half hour: calming, soothing, doing what he could, and in so doing managing to get a few more personal details out of her, enough to give the police something to go on, anyway. But when it was time to go she wouldn’t let him without he promised he’d see her again. She hadn’t been there long, but already Penny had discovered that death was a lonely place.

  The Necroscope was jaded—or thought he was—by life, death, everything. He believed he needed motivation. Before leaving her he asked if she’d mind if he looked at her. She told him that if it were anyone else she couldn’t care less, because she wouldn’t even know they were looking, not any longer. But with Harry she would know, because he was the Necroscope. She was just a shy kid.

  “Hey!” he protested, but gently, “I’m no voyeur!”

  If I wasn’t … if he hadn’t … if I was unmarked, then I don’t think I’d mind, she said.

  “Penny, you’re lovely,” Harry told her. “And me? After all’s said and done, I’m only human. But believe me I’m not putting you down when I tell you that right now I’m not interested in that side of things. It’s because you’re marked that I want to see you. I need to feel angry. And now that I know you, I know that to see what he did would make me feel angry.”

  Then I’ll just have to pretend you’re my doctor, she said.

  Harry very gently took the rubbe
r sheet off her pale, young body, looked at her, and tremblingly put the sheet back again.

  Is it bad? She fought down a sob. It’s such a shame. Mum always said I could be a model.

  “So you could,” he told her. “You were very beautiful.”

  But not now? And though she kept from actually sobbing, he could feel her despair brimming over. But in a little while she said: Harry? Did it make you angry?

  He felt a growl rising in his throat, suppressed it, and before he left her said, “Oh, yes. Yes, it did.”

  Darcy Clarke was still outside the door with the plain-clothesman. Looking washed out, Harry joined them and closed the door after him. “I’ve left the sheet off her face,” he said. And then, speaking specifically to—and glaring at—the officer: “Don’t cover her face!”

  The other raised an indifferent eyebrow and shrugged. “Who, me?” he said, his accent nasal, Glaswegian, less than sympathetic. “Ah had nothing tae do wi’ it, Chief. It’s just that when they’re dead ’uns, people usually cover them up!”

  Harry turned swiftly towards him, eyes widening and nostrils flaring in his pale, grimacing face, and Darcy Clarke’s instinct took over. The Necroscope was suddenly dangerous and Clarke’s weird talent knew it. There was a terrible anger in him, which he needed to take out on someone. But Clarke knew that it wasn’t directed at him, wasn’t directed at anyone but simply required an outlet.

  Quickly forcing himself between Harry and the special-duty officer, he grabbed the Necroscope’s arms. “It’s okay, Harry,” he said urgently. “It’s okay. It’s just that these people see things like this all the time. It doesn’t affect them so much. They get used to it.”

  Harry got a grip of himself, but not without an effort of will. He looked at Clarke and growled, “They don’t see things like that all the time! No one’s ever going to ‘get used’ to the idea that someone—something—could do that to a girl!” And then, seeing Clarke’s bewildered expression: “I’ll explain later.”