Necroscope V: Deadspawn n-5 Page 5

  The last man to occupy this desk had been Norman Harold Wellesley, a traitor. Wellesley was gone now, dead, but the fact that he’d ever existed at all — and in this of all jobs — must have caused ructions further up the line. What, a double-agent? A spy among mindspies? Something which must never be allowed to happen again, obviously; but how to stop it from happening again? Could it be that someone had been appointed to watch the watchers?

  It reminded Clarke of a ditty his mother had used to say to him when he was small and had an itch. She would find the spot and scratch it, reciting:

  ‘Big fleas have little fleas

  upon their backs to bite ‘em.

  And little fleas have smaller fleas,

  and so ad infinitum!’

  Was Clarke himself under esper scrutiny? And if so, what had been read from his mind?

  He got on to the switchboard, said: ‘Get me the Minister Responsible. If he’s not available, leave a message that he’s to call me back soonest. Also, I’d like someone to run me off a duplicate set of police reports on those girls in that serial killer case.’

  Half an hour later the reports were delivered to him, and as he was putting them in a large envelope he got his call from the Minister. ‘Yes, Clarke?’

  ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I just had Harry Keogh on the ‘phone.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘He asked for a set of reports on the girls in the serial killer case. As you’ll recall, we asked for his help on that.’

  ‘I recall that you asked for his help, Clarke, yes. But in fact I’m not so sure it was a good idea. Indeed, I think it’s time to rethink our attitude towards Keogh.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. I know he’s been of some assistance to the Branch, and — ‘

  ‘Some?’ Clarke had to cut in. ‘Some assistance? We’d have all been goners long ago without him. We can’t ever repay him. Not just us but everyone. And I do mean everyone.’

  Things change, Clarke,’ said that unseen, unknown other. ‘You people are a weird lot — no offence — and Keogh has to be the weirdest of all. Also, he’s not really one of you. So as of now I want you to avoid contact with him. But we’ll talk about him again later, I’m sure.’

  The warning bells rang even louder. Talking to the Minister Responsible was always like talking to a very smooth robot, but this time he was just too smooth. ‘And the police reports? Does he get them?’

  ‘I think not. Let’s just keep him at arm’s length for the moment, right?’

  ‘Is there something to worry about, maybe?’ Clarke came straight out with it. ‘Do you think perhaps we should watch him?’

  ‘Why, you surprise me!’ said the other, smooth as ever. ‘It was my understanding that Keogh had always been a good friend of yours.’

  ‘He has.’

  ‘Well, and doubtless that was of value at the time. But as I said, things change. I will get back to you about him — one way or the other — in good time. But until then… was there anything else?’

  ‘One small thing.’ Clarke kept his tone neutral but scowled at the ‘phone. ‘About Paxton…‘It was a leaf straight out of Harry Keogh’s book, and it worked just as well for Clarke.

  ‘Paxton?’ (He actually heard the Minister catch his breath!) Then, more cautiously, perhaps curiously: ‘Paxton? But we’re no longer interested in him, are we?’

  ‘It’s just that I was reading through his records,’ Clarke lied, ‘his progress reports, you know? And it seemed to me we lost a good one there. Is it possible you’ve been maybe a bit too thorough? A shame to lose him if there’s a chance we can bring him on. We really can’t afford to waste talents like his.’

  ‘Clarke,’ the Minister sighed, ‘you have your side of the job, and I have mine. I don’t question your decisions, do I?’

  Don’t you?

  ‘And I really would appreciate it if you wouldn’t question mine. Forget about Paxton, he’s out of it.’

  ‘As you wish — but I think I’ll at least keep an eye on him. If only from a distance. After all, we’re not the only ones in the mindspy game. I’d hate it if he were recruited by the other side…’

  The Minister was getting peeved. ‘For the moment you have quite enough work on your plate!’ he snapped. ‘Leave Paxton be. A periodic check will suffice — when I say so!’

  Clarke was only polite when people were polite to him. He was far too important to let himself be stepped on. ‘Keep your shirt on… sir,’ he growled. ‘Anything I say or do is in the Branch’s best interest, believe me — even when I step on toes.’

  ‘Of course, of course.’ The other was at once conciliatory. ‘But we’re all in the same boat, Clarke, and none of us knows everything. So for the time being let’s just trust each other, all right?’

  Oh, yeah, let’s! Sure! ‘Fine,’ Clarke said. ‘I’m sorry I’ve taken up so much of your time.’

  ‘That’s all right. We’ll be speaking again soon, I’m sure…’

  Clarke put the ‘phone down and continued to scowl at it a while, then sealed the envelope containing the police reports and scrawled Harry Keogh’s address on it. He erased his and Keogh’s recent conversation, then asked the switchboard if they’d traced the call. They had and it was Harry’s Edinburgh number. He ‘phoned it direct but got no answer. And finally he called a courier into his office and gave him the envelope.

  ‘Post it, please,’ he said, but before the courier could leave: ‘No, repackage the whole thing and send it off special delivery. And then forget you ever saw it, right?’

  In a little while he was alone with his dark, suspicious thoughts again, and an itch between his shoulderblades which he couldn’t quite get at.

  And his mother’s ditty about fleas, which was equally persistent.

  3 Changeling

  Harry Keogh, Necroscope, didn’t know Darcy Clarke’s ditty, but he did have a flea on his back. Several, in fact. And they were biting him.

  Geoffrey Paxton was only one and probably the least of them, but because he was reachable and immediate he was the most frightening. Harry wasn’t frightened of Paxton, rather of what he might do to Paxton if he lost control. And of what losing control might conceivably do to him, to the Necroscope himself. He knew how easy it would be to betray himself and reveal that he was no longer an innocent but that some great and as yet undeveloped (but developing, certainly) Darkness had entered him.

  That was what Paxton was looking for, Harry knew: proof that the Necroscope was no longer a fit citizen or habitant of Earth — no longer, indeed, a man, not entirely — but an alien creature and a monstrous threat. And when he knew it for sure, when there was no longer any doubt, then Paxton would report that fact and there would be war. Harry Keogh versus The Rest. The rest of Mankind. And that was the last thing Harry wanted, to be at odds with a world and its peoples which he had fought so long and so hard to keep safe.

  Paxton, then, was a flea on Harry’s back, a niggle at the edge of — attempting to dig its way deeper into — his mind, an irritation. And because Paxton’s presence was representative of an even greater threat, which must ultimately challenge the Necroscope’s very existence, it was something Harry could well do without. For to the Wamphyri the single ‘honourable’ answer to any challenge may only be written in blood!

  Wamphryri!

  The word itself was… a Power.

  It was a tingling in the core of his being, an awareness of passions beyond the feeble, fumbling emotions of men, a savage, explosive nuclear energy contained — but barely — in his seething blood. It was a chain-reaction which was happening to him even now, whose catalyst was blood. And in itself it, too, was a challenge. But one which he must resist, which he must not, dare not answer. Not if he desired to remain ascendant and for the most part human.

  A flea, then, this Paxton. An invader who would stick his proboscis in that most private and inviolable of all human territories, the mind itself, and siphon out its thoughts. A spy, a thought-thief- a parasite
come to sup on Harry’s secrets — a flea. But only one flea of several, and not one whose bites he could afford to scratch.

  Another unbearable itch was the fact that the dead — the Great Majority of mankind, who yet lay apart from and unknowable to mankind, with the sole (the soul?) exception of Harry Keogh — were withdrawing from him. He was losing his rapport; the change in him had wrought a change in them. Their trust was weakening.

  Oh, there were many among them who owed him beyond their means to repay, and many more who had loved him for his own sake, to whom the Necroscope had always been the one glimmer of light in an otherwise everlasting darkness, but even these were wary of him now. For when he had been simply Harry — unsullied and unsullying, innocent and gentle — why, then it had been a marvellous thing that he could touch the dead and they touch him! But all of that was yesterday.

  And now that he was more than Harry? There are certain things which even dead men fear, and limits to what even they will lie still for…

  Since the destruction of Janos Ferenczy and his works, Harry had been busy. Other than the constant irritation of Geoffrey Paxton the only intrusion he’d allowed — the single distraction from his purpose, because he had no control over it — was the knowledge that a necromancer lived and practised his abominations in England. It distracted him because Penny Sanderson was now his friend (his ward, even?) and because he was privy to what she and others like her had gone through.

  Of the fact that the forces of law and order would track down and apprehend Penny’s torturer, murderer, and then violator eventually, Harry had little doubt; but they would never charge him with the full range of his offences, because they had no yardstick by which to measure them. They neither knew nor were capable of defining a full range of offences, not in this case. And certainly there was no punishment which would fit the crime. Not in law.

  But the Necroscope fully understood the nature of this beast and his crimes, and his ideas of punishment were rather more stringent. Even before his contamination he’d had that. It was a flame which had been sparked in him by the murder of his own sweet mother, and which burned just as lively to this day. An eye for an eye.

  As to what Harry had been doing since removing the last of the Ferenczys forever from the world of men: his works had been weird and wonderful, and the thoughts in his Möbius mind even more so.

  To begin with, he’d brought back Trevor Jordan’s ashes from Rhodes. The incorporeal telepath had wished it (death might have some sort of meaning with Harry to talk to), but not even Jordan had suspected Harry’s real purpose.

  By themselves, however, the essential salts of a man were insufficient to put Harry’s plan into action, not and achieve the entirely satisfactory result which he sought. Which was why, before reducing further the ruins of Janos Ferenczy’s castle, the Necroscope had removed from them certain chemical substances by means of which Janos had performed his own monstrous brand of necromancy.

  Not all of the dead would wish for such a resurgence, Harry knew: the Thracian warrior-king Bodrogk and his wife Sofia, whose world had lain two thousand years in the past, had been happy to collapse in each other’s arms and return to dust (a merciful release for them, who had prayed for it so often). But what of the much more recently dead?

  Like Trevor Jordan, for instance?

  The answer might seem easy: why not ask him? But in fact that was the hardest thing of all. ‘I intend to return you to life. I have the apparatus but I’m not one hundred per cent sure of the system. It worked perfectly well for another, but he had the advantage of many hundreds of years of experimentation. In the event all goes well you will be as you were; except, well… you’ll recall that you did put a bullet through your brain. I’m not entirely sure how that will affect you. If when I call you up from your ashes I discover that you’re a complete gibbering fucking idiot then, however reluctantly, I’ll be obliged to put you down again. Now, provided you’re perfectly happy with all of this

  Or, in Penny Sanderson’s case: ‘Penny, I think I can bring you back. But if I get the mixture wrong it could be that you’ll not be as lovely as you were. I mean, your skin and features could be imperfect, or blemished, or pocked… hideously. For example, some of the things I called up in the Castle Ferenczy were quite monstrous; there were depletions, inconsistencies, er, anomalies? Wherefore I reserve the right to erase you if things go wrong. But of course we’ll always be able to try again, later, when with a bit of luck I’ll get it right.’

  No, he couldn’t tell them what he had in mind, not yet. If he gave them the bare bones of the matter they’d require him to flesh it out, and if he elaborated they’d fret about every smallest detail. And from now until the actual — resurrection? — they’d mix anticipation with dread, alternating shivers of excitement with shudders of terror most extreme. They’d climb high mountains of hope, only to tumble back into black lakes of deepest despair and depression.

  ‘I have a shot which may cure your cancer… but it just might give you AIDS.’

  That was how it would feel to Harry, if the roles were reversed; but at the same time he knew that of course it wasn’t like that: when you’re dead you’re beyond hope, and so any hope has to be better than none. Or does it? Or was that simply the vampire in him — tenacity aspiring to immortality — doing his thinking for him?

  Or… perhaps he hesitated for another, far more elemental reason: something which warned him that with his small talents (small, yes, in the scale of a universe or parallel multiverses) he must not, dare not, usurp one of the Greater Talents of that Other whom men called God? History’s necromancers, among which Janos had been a latecomer, had dared it, and where were they now? Had there been avenging angels before Harry, to put right the wrongs of these wizards? And if so, would there be one after him, to chastise him in his turn?

  Harry had been the Necroscope, was becoming a vampire, and now would be a necromancer in his own right. How dare he seek out Penny’s murderer to punish him on the one hand, and on the other pursue the practice of that same black art? What would be his punishment?

  Perhaps the gears were already engaged, the wheels even now turning. Perhaps the Necroscope had already gone too far, disturbing the delicate balance between Good and Evil to such an extent that it now required radical readjustment. Had he simply become too powerful, which is to say corrupt? How did the old saying go: ‘Absolute power corrupts absolutely’? Ridiculous! Was God Himself corrupt? No, for the maxims of men are like their laws: they apply only to men.

  Such arguments were endless in the metamorphosis of the Necroscope’s mind and body, until sometimes he thought he was mad. But when his thoughts were clear he knew that he was not mad; it was just the thing that was in him, altering his perceptions along with everything else.

  And then he would remember how he used to be, determine that he must always be that way, and know that he hesitated only out of consideration for his friends among the dead. It was simply that he didn’t want Trevor and Penny to suffer agonies of protracted uncertainty, only to let them down when the waiting was over. To die once is enough, as had been made perfectly plain by Janos’s many Thracian thralls in the bowels of the Castle Ferenczy.

  As for God: if there was such a One (and Harry had never been sure) then the Necroscope supposed he must consider his talents God-given and use them accordingly. While he could.

  Harry had spent a good deal of his time arguing, not least with himself. If a subject took his fancy — almost any subject — he would play word-games with himself to the point of distraction and delirium: a sort of mental masturbation. But it wasn’t just himself he was jerking off; in conversations with the dead he was equally argumentative, even when he suspected that they were right and he was wrong.

  Indeed, he seemed to argue for the sake of it, out of sheer contrariness. He thought and argued about God; also about good and evil, about science, pseudoscience and sorcery, their similarities, discrepancies and ambiguities. Space, time and space-time
fascinated him, and especially mathematics with its inalienable laws and pure logic. The very changelessness of maths was a constant joy and relief to the Necroscope’s changeling mind in its changeling body.

  Within a day or two of returning from the Greek islands he had used the instantaneous medium of the Möbius Continuum to go to Leipzig and see (speak to) August Ferdinand Möbius where he lay in his grave. Möbius had been and still was a great mathematician and astronomer; indeed he was the man whose genius had saved Harry’s life on several occasions, again through the medium of his Möbius Continuum. But while Harry’s primary purpose in visiting Möbius was to thank him for the return of his numeracy, instead he ended up arguing with him.

  The great man had happened to mention that his next project would be to measure space, and as soon as the Necroscope heard this he threw himself headlong into an argument. This time the argument was ‘Space, Time, Light and the Multiverses’.

  Won’t ‘Universe’ suffice? Möbius had wanted to know.

  ‘Not at all,’ Harry had answered, ‘because we know there are parallels. I’ve visited one, remember?’ (And East German students with their notebooks had wondered at this peculiar man who stood by a dead scientist’s tomb muttering to himself.)

  Very well then, let’s concentrate on the one we know best, Möbius had been logical about it. This one.

  ‘You’ll measure it?’

  I propose to.

  ‘But since it’s constantly expanding, how will you go about it?’

  I shall stand at its outermost rim, beyond which there is nothing, transfer myself instantaneously through the universe to the far rim, beyond which there is likewise nothing, and in so doing measure the distance between. Then I shall transfer myself instantaneously back here and perform the same experiment exactly one hour later, and again an hour after that.

  ‘Good!’ Harry had answered. ‘But… to what purpose?’

  (A sigh.) Why, from that time forward — and whenever I require to know it — a correct calculation of the size of the universe will be instantly available!