Harry and the Pirates_and Other Tales from the Lost Years Read online

  At the moment, however—relaxing as best a restless nature would allow, in a deck chair, in the seclusion of the garden of a friend he had known since pre-teen secondary-modern school-days prior to the start of his technical education and the continuation of pursuits that were rather more esoteric—there was no fear of that.

  His boyhood friend was James “Jimmy” Collins, who was once Captain of the school’s football team and later became the best striker Harden Colliery Football Club ever had—until, at only seventeen years of age, his right knee bent sideways in a game and failed to get better, ever. Since when he had been an electrician like his father before him, which was a lot better than working down in the pits would have been, if they’d lasted longer. Despite Jimmy’s alleged boyhood aversion to girls (he had once sworn that he would “hang himself from a goalpost” rather than get caught with his arm around a girl when the lights went up at the local cinema), he had ended up getting one in trouble, done the right thing and married her, and just seven months later learned that the baby wasn’t his. No, it belonged to the youth he caught his wife with when he came home early from a job one morning. Well, he was not the first young man who had fallen for that one, and he certainly wouldn’t be the last. Fortunately the little house his parents had given him as a wedding present was in his name; the “lady” had moved out—and right out of the district, too—and Jimmy had gone back to swearing off girls.

  “Still weird, eh Harry?” Jimmy’s voice broke the garden’s sunny afternoon silence, and broke into Harry’s mental privacy. Actually, it roused him from a drowsy, very-nearly-asleep condition of semi-consciousness. He’d been dreaming about . . . someone calling? A cry for help? A distant, desperate, and possibly dead voice? An SOS from beyond? Well, perhaps. But far more likely a daydream, gone now into that limbo where all dreams are said to have origin. Whichever, he wasn’t too concerned; he had “heard” or become aware or conscious of several ill-defined, out-of-the-ordinary sounds or thoughts just recently, especially that time when he’d discovered that even fossils from Earth’s prehistoric past can have “voices” of a sort.

  Lifting his head, Harry blinked owlishly as Jimmy Collins came from the house into the garden. Jimmy was carrying chilled fruit drinks in tall glasses, one in each hand, and as he drew closer Harry muttered, “Eh? What’s that you say?”

  Jimmy nodded, and answered: “Yep, you’re still weird! Even if I didn’t recognize the physical Harry Keogh—or rather your face, which I couldn’t, and didn’t—still I think I would have sensed the weirdness anyway and known it was you. Like who else could it be, knowing what you knew? And you know something? For all that you look different, still the longer you’re around and the more I see of you—even though you’ve only been here for a week—damned if you haven’t started to look more and more like . . . well, like you! Like Harry! I mean like the Harry you used to be! Damn!”

  Wide awake now, Harry knew precisely what the other meant. But grinning at his young old friend from the shade of his hat, and reaching for the welcome drink that Jimmy was offering him, still he said, “Oh yes? And after a muddled mouthful like that, you still have the nerve to call me weird? Was that English you were speaking just then, Jimmy?”

  “Huh!” said his friend, pulling a face. “Oh, you’re weird all right, Harry! But hey—is it any wonder I get my words all tangled? I mean, after all this time, showing up here, like . . . like this? Who else would have believed that story you told me, if not someone who would recognise Harry Keogh’s weirdness, eh? It may have been a long time, but yours is a brand of peculiar that’s unmistakable. Well to me it is, anyway.”

  “Precisely why I came to see you!” said Harry, with a curt nod. “Because I knew you would know it was me. But also to find out if you’d heard anything of Brenda; and to check on you, see how you were doing—because I’d heard you had problems. Yes, I knew you’d accept me, Jimmy . . . and you’re right, it has been a long time since I moved from school here in Harden to the technical college in Hartlepool. After that, I don’t know, we just seemed to lose touch.”

  Nodding, Jimmy seated himself in a deck chair next to the Necroscope. “Yes, we did,” he said, “until you showed up again and asked me to be your Best Man. You and Brenda Cowell, sweethearts at first sight, or as nearly so as makes no difference.” Reaching out, he lifted the floppy brim of Harry’s hat to stare deep into the other’s eyes, and continued: “Both of us married, eh, Harry? As it happens, way too young, and both regretting it. Mine has gone—good riddance, I say—and yours has flown the coop, leaving you to wonder why and to grieve over it.”

  “No,” said Harry, “I don’t think I am grieving any longer. And I do know why; at least I think I do. It’s this new face of mine. My face, and my . . . my . . .” He paused for a single moment, then hurriedly went on: “And anyway, Jimmy, as you just pointed out, we were much too young. . . .” He had caught himself barely in time, having almost said, “my face and body!” Which could only have led to a lot more questions.

  For the body he was wearing—despite that it was a good, healthy one—wasn’t the original that he had been born inside. Neither the face, nor the body. No, for not long ago the Necroscope had undergone an astonishing, involuntary metempsychosis, until now “he,” the mind and soul of Harry Keogh, inhabited the body of someone else. Mercifully that someone had been completely brain-dead when Harry commandeered his empty shell; there’d been no arguing over possession, as it were. But there had also been precious little hope that his wife would accept him in his new identity, and it was one of a number of reasons why she had fled and taken the baby with her; or more properly why the baby had caused or enabled her flight . . . which is another, and perhaps even stranger story . . . .

  As if reading Harry’s mind, Jimmy was now frowning, examinining his guest more closely and biting his lip as his narrowed eyes swept the Necroscope up and down. And finally, shaking his head, he said, “Even now—I mean, you know what I mean—even now I’m not quite, not entirely—”

  “What, not sure, Jimmy?” Harry cut him short. “And is this the same bloke who stood beside me on the beach after I knocked that bully Stanley Green on his fat backside? Oh, you were sure enough then! There was a whole bunch of our classmates there. I had given Green a beating, then offered the same to anyone else who fancied it. I told them: ‘What I said to this shit goes for the rest of you.’ Something like that, anyway. Then I said: ‘Or should any one of you just happen to fancy his chances here and now . . . ?’ Which was when—”

  “—When I came to stand beside you,” Jimmy took over from him, “and said, ‘Or any two of you?’ There were no takers. Huh! They weren’t cowards, just a bunch of ordinary school-kids. And after they’d seen big bully Green knocked down in the dirt, his nose all wobbly, blubbing and grovelling, they were relieved it was over, that’s all. . . .”

  Harry nodded. “Yes, that’s exactly how it was. So then, is this me or isn’t it?”

  “Well, it better be,” the other grinned ruefully. “Especially since you’ve been sleeping in my spare bedroom for a week! But even so you tell a damn strange story. Like, you were working for the government on a secret job when you were caught in an explosion that wrecked your face, so they fixed you up with plastic surgery? I mean, how weird is that?”

  The Necroscope shrugged. He wasn’t much for lying—certainly not to a friend—but he knew that the truth was stranger yet. Jimmy really wouldn’t have been able to accept the truth, which would have thrown everything else into doubt, causing all sorts of complications. Harry might have had to find other lodgings, for one thing, or go back along the Möbius route to his place on the outskirts of Edinburgh every night, which wasn’t a good idea. He was actually enjoying his time away from that old house, in the company of one of his few living friends from his school days, and the trouble with indiscriminate and unnecessary use of the Möbius Continuum was that he might be observed stepping out of nowhere when he arrived back in Harden one morning.
Life was difficult enough already, and Harry was an adherent of the creed that the easiest plan is usually the best.

  “I mean,” Jimmy went on in that questioning manner of his, “why couldn’t these secret government people fix you up with a younger face? Er, not that you’re ugly, you understand, but was that the best they could do for you?”

  Fortunately Harry had seen fit to devise an answer to that one in advance. “They couldn’t just pick and choose, Jimmy!” he said. “And neither could I. This is how it came out, and that’s it. And anyway, it serves a purpose: with these new looks I can go on working undercover, you know?”

  Jimmy scratched his head. “My old pal has become some kind of secret agent!” he said. “Harry Keogh, aka 008! So why aren’t you working ‘undercover’ right now—or are you? What, here in Harden? Hell no! No way! Impossible!—unless some crazed terrorist is building a nuclear device in one of Harden’s old mineshafts! Mind you, he’d have to be really crazy, because there’s not too much that’s worth blowing to smithereens around here!”

  “Ha! Ha!” said Harry, however humourlessly. “No, you know I’m looking for Brenda. See, I’m still a bit, er, shell-shocked after the explosion—just one of the hazards of being a field operative—and this is how I’m using some of my R and R time.” He tried not to look or feel too guilty, and knew that in fact he wasn’t guilty; for despite that he was lying now, it wasn’t long ago that the Necroscope had been involved—in his unique way, and however involuntarily—in some vastly important work on behalf of a special branch of Her Majesty’s Secret Services.

  Now Jimmy sighed, shook his head, and said, “I still can’t tell whether you’re serious or not! But you’re weird and that’s for sure! What was it you were muttering to yourself when I was coming out of the house? You were asleep, or almost asleep. You were very still and quiet and seemed to be holding your breath, as if you were straining to hear someone or something. Then you began to mumble to yourself and I think I heard you say, ‘What? Who? Where?’ Something questioning like that, anyway. Now what was that all about? A nightmare maybe? Or rather, a daymare?”

  Harry shrugged, and answered: “A bad dream? I suppose it’s possible.” And after sipping thoughtfully at his drink, he continued: “In which case maybe I should be grateful that you woke me up, eh? But whatever it was—and since I can’t remember anything about it, it couldn’t have been too important. No, it was just a common—‘or garden’—dream, that’s all. No big deal.”

  And perhaps it really wasn’t such a big deal; but now that Jimmy had started him thinking about it—wondering why he’d seemed to be, what, “straining to hear someone or something?”—suddenly Harry wasn’t nearly so sure about that. . . .

  The fact was that the Necroscope had been hearing—or rather, sensing—things for some time now. The talent he had inherited from his female forebears (a talent which some, including Harry himself, might from time to time more readily consider a curse) was gradually becoming more acute in him. If it had been purely physical, as in diseased, malfunctioning hearing, then it might be diagnosed as tinnitus or a similar disorder. But how to diagnose a metaphysical—indeed a parapsychological—condition as grotesque as this one, involving things which Harry “heard” not with his ears but with his mind? In a future as yet unimagined and unimaginable, he would name his dubious talent “deadspeak” when using it to communicate with deceased people. As for what he was experiencing now, however—

  —While some of the things that “spoke” to or “informed” him were most definitely dead, they were not always people. . . .

  In addition to which, there were perfectly normal mechanical sounds which Harry heard, naturally enough, with his ears. Out in the privacy of Jimmy’s walled garden, for instance, the buzzing of bees in the roses and flower borders wasn’t the only sound; there was also the infrequent drone of an airplane from on high, the sound of traffic from the main coast road, even the near-distant clicketty-clack of steel wheels on rails, wafting on the balmy summer air right across the sleepy village from Harden’s old railway viaduct.

  Of course, these were sounds that Harry heard like so much white noise—sounds he expected to hear—which in no way registered as other than ordinary. . . .

  In that selfsame garden, however, beneath the overhang of inward-sloping terra-cotta tiles where they decorated the top of the high wall, several spiders had their webs, all more or less evenly spaced out so as to avoid territorial disputes. In those web larders of the spiders, the tiny corpses of flying—or at least once-flying—insects were neatly cocooned and hung like game to ripen. If Harry were to concentrate on these small dead creatures he would actually—and had actually—become conscious of a certain sensation, awareness or intuition: the merest glimmer, as faint in his unique mind as the fantasised sound of a snowflake’s fall to earth might be in his ears. He had traced this un-sound to the fly mummies under the tiles.

  And yet this was more than mere intuition, for Harry sensed the surprise, bewilderment, even the indignation of the drained midges. It was in a way “sentience”—according to that word’s definition, at least—if not as men would normally understand and accept it. But in his mind it registered as a question—or more properly an infinitely small “why?”—to which there could never be any answer that the insects framing the question would understand.

  They only understood that the freedoms they had known were no more, that their aerial scavenging and pheromone-driven contact with others of their species—natural pleasures of eating and mating—had been suspended, replaced by this abrupt denial of flight. Then there had been the struggle that shook the web, and the rapid approach of the terror that these silken vibrations had so swiftly summoned; finally the paralysing bite that had frozen life to a halt, leaving only the darkness.

  And in the absence of everything they had known—as individuals deprived of life while yet they had no concept of death—these cocooned insects could only ask, “Why?”

  Which was the “why?” that the Necroscope heard.

  Deprived individuals, yes. But—

  —In sharp contrast, three inches underground, in a sandy border at the rim of a path where the crazy-paving was cracked, the bodies of a veritable community, an almost entire colony of one of Nature’s smallest ant species—insects only a few millimetres in length—were heaped in what was meant to have been a last-ditch attempt at providing a protective phalanx around a pile of glistening, tiny white eggs. The colony had been killed off by Jimmy Collins after he noticed a lot of ant activity and all the damage their excavations were doing to his path. It was truly astonishing that anything so insignificant could make any impression on the world at all, but small heaps of soil and the dust of crumbling mortar were ample evidence of just how effective the ants had been in undermining his garden path.

  Also evident (at least to the Necroscope) the massed cry of distress and total panic that Harry could “hear” or sense issuing from the poisoned hive. Faint as the deadspeak cries of the enshrouded flies, yet totally different in nature, these myriad voices had one theme, one concern, and issued forth as from the mind of one creature. “Survive!” that massed voice cried, despite that Jimmy and his insecticide had seen to it that survival was no longer an option. “Survive! . . . Save the eggs! . . . Protect the young queens!” But of course, for they were the entire future of a hundred hives yet to be!

  Not even a whisper in the Necroscope’s mind—nothing more than intuition—yet still he knew that once again dead things were crying out against the immobility, negativity, and unknown darkness of death. But as with the cocooned flies it was knowledge he could ignore, must ignore because there was nothing he could do about it. The world seemed to be full of dead things; even the soil underfoot was made of dead things! And if indeed the Necroscope tried to accept or empathise with every thought, message, or feeling—with every ache or echo from beyond—it would surely mean the end of him.

  And so Harry was having to learn to put this side
effect—this parallel or ancillary phenomenon of his talent—aside and make white noise of it, as he did with so much of what he heard with his ears, just like every other human being whose hearing is not impaired. And he was succeeding, except—

  —“Hey, are you all right?” Jimmy Collins’ concerned query from the shade of the doorway finally got through to the Necroscope. Jimmy had been absent for a few minutes only, topping up their drinks in his kitchen, and Harry had half-dozed off again—or so Jimmy supposed. He could scarcely be blamed for believing this was so, for on returning to the garden he’d discovered his guest with his arms folded on his chest, head down, and hat low over his eyes, as still as a man deeply asleep. But in fact Harry had been wrapt in concentration . . . listening . . . listening . . . listening! If not with his ears.

  Listening to the incorporeal, yes, but not to anything as inconsequential (however remarkable) as ant and fly murmurings; not now that a yet more remarkable phenomenon had arrested his attention, and not now that he recognised it as something very different and very strange.

  “Eh?” Starting—giving a pretty good impression of someone freshly shocked awake—Harry jerked upright in his deck chair. “I . . . I must have drifted off again! So now you can see how it is with me. Like I told you, I’m still sort of shell-shocked. I can’t seem to stay awake for more than a couple of minutes at a time.” He offered a shrug. “But perhaps it’s just that I’m warm and comfortable here, and the place is so peaceful and all. . . .”

  Jimmy was concerned, and the Necroscope felt bad about it: that he had conned his old friend like that. But it was part of the action that he now intended to take. “I think I’ll just—” he began to say. But Jimmy cut him off with:

  “And I think you’ll be better off taking a nap indoors! If you go to sleep with your mouth open out here, you’re likely to come a cropper. It’s just a fortnight ago that I got stung by a wasp inside my lip doing just that—falling asleep in the garden. It still hurts, even to talk about it!” But: