Deadspawn Read online

  “That’s all of it: a few things to do, something I have to straighten out, and one or two new things to learn. And then it will be time I walked. I’d rather walk than be chased.”

  And you’ll never come back?

  “I might, if I learned how to hold the thing permanently in check. But if I can’t … no, never.”

  How will you deal with this man, murderer, monster, you’re looking for?

  “As quick and as cleanly as he’ll let me. You don’t know what he does, Ma, but I can tell you I won’t soil my hands on him, not if I can help it. Killing him will be like cutting out a tumor in the flesh of humanity.”

  You’ve cut out a few of those, son.

  Harry nodded. “And one more to go.”

  And the girl who doesn’t deserve to be dead? That was a strange way of putting it, Harry.

  “It’s such a recent thing for her, Ma.” (Harry knew he’d strayed into a mine field, looked in vain for a safe landmark.) “She’s not used to it yet. And … and she doesn’t have to get used to it. I mean, I can help her.”

  You’ve learned a new thing, Harry, she answered, but very slowly, and he sensed something different in her voice which was never there before—fear? You learned it from Janos Ferenczy, and I can feel it. Yes, and it’s what puts you apart from us now. We can all feel it! And suddenly her deadspeak was racked with small shudders.

  His ma, too? Had he alienated even his warm, sweet ma? Suddenly, he had the feeling that if he let her go she’d just drift away from him and keep on drifting. Perhaps into that beyond place which she sensed waiting there. But he had one trump card left, and now played it:

  “Ma, am I good or bad? Was I born good or evil?”

  She read the anxiety in his deadspeak and returned at once. Oh, you were good, son. How can you doubt it? You were always so good!

  “Well, nothing’s changed, Ma. Not yet, and not here. I promise you, I won’t let anything change me, not here. If and when I feel it—as soon as I feel I can’t hold it any longer—then I’ll go.”

  But if you bring that girl back, what will she be?

  “Beautiful, just as she was. Maybe not physically beautiful—though it’s a fact she was lovely—but alive. And that’s to be beautiful. You know that.”

  But for how long, son? I mean, will she age? Will she die? What will she be? What will she be, Harry?!

  He had no answer. “Just a girl. I don’t know.”

  And her children? What will they be?

  “Ma, I don’t know! I only know she’s too much alive to be dead.”

  Are you doing it for … yourself?

  “No, just for her, and for all of you.”

  He sensed her shaking her head. I don’t know, son. I just don’t know.

  “Trust me, Ma.”

  Well, I suppose I’ll have to. So how can I help?

  Harry was eager now, except;

  “Ma, I don’t want to weaken you. You said you were all used up.”

  So I am, but if you can fight, so can I. If the dead won’t talk to you, maybe they’ll still talk to me. While they can.

  He nodded his gratitude and in a little while said: “There were others before Penny Sanderson. I know their names from the newspapers, but I have to know where they were laid to rest and I need an introduction. See, they were badly hurt and probably won’t trust someone like me, who can touch them from this side. I mean, the one who killed them, he could do that, too. While I do need to talk to them, I don’t want to frighten them more than they already are. So you see, without you it would be just too difficult.”

  So you want to know which graveyards they’re in, right?

  “Right. It probably wouldn’t be too hard to find out for myself, but there are so many things on my mind that keep getting in the way. And so time goes by.”

  All right, Harry, I’ll do what I can. But I don’t want to have to track you down anymore, so it would be better if you came to see me. That way I … She paused, cut off abruptly.

  “Ma?”

  Didn’t you feel that, son? I always feel it, when they’re close by like that.

  “What was it?”

  Someone joining us, she answered sadly. Someone dying. Some thing, anyway.

  A medium in life, in death Mary Keogh’s contact with death was that much sharper. But what had she meant? It wasn’t clear, and Harry felt the short hairs prickle on the back of his neck. “Some … thing?” he repeated her.

  A pet, a puppy, an accident, she sighed. And some poor child’s heart broken. In Bonnyrig. Just this minute.

  The Necroscope felt his own heart give a start; he’d lost so much during his life that the thought of another’s loss, however small, stung him with its poignancy. Or maybe it was just the way his mother had reported the occurrence, so soulfully. Or there again it could be an effect of his heightened emotional awareness. Maybe there was someone he could comfort.

  “Bonnyrig, did you say? Ma, I’ll be going now. I’ll come and see you tomorrow. Maybe you’ll know something by then.”

  Take care, son.

  Harry stood up, looked up and down the river and across it to the other side. The bright sun had passed behind fluffy, drifting clouds, which was a relief.

  He climbed a tottering fence and entered a small copse, and in the dappled heart of the greenery conjured a Möbius door. A moment later and he emerged in a back alley close to the high street in Bonnyrig. And letting his deadspeak sensitivity spread out around him like a fan or cobweb, he searched for a newcomer among the ranks of the dead.

  And there it was, close by: a whining yelp in memory of the panic and pain of a few moments ago, and a certain astonishment that the pain was no longer here, and disbelief that the bright day could so quickly turn black and blacker than night. A dumb animal’s perception of sudden death.

  Harry understood it very well, for it wasn’t too dissimilar to the reaction of a human being. The only difference being that dogs have neither foreknowledge of nor preoccupation with death, so that their surprise is that much greater. But strike or kick a dog unjustly or cruelly and it will draw back with just the same astonishment, the same disbelief.

  Taking a chance that he wasn’t observed, the Necroscope used the Möbius Continuum to follow the pup’s thoughts to their source: a curbside in the main village street, at a junction where the street turned left onto the main road into Edinburgh. A workday, there weren’t many people about; the handful which had gathered had their backs to Harry, anyway, where he emerged onto the pavement as if from thin air. And the first thing he saw was the long, dark skid mark burned into the road’s surface.

  The pup’s deadspeak thoughts were more desperate now as it realized that it couldn’t extricate itself from this new predicament. There was no feeling, no contact, no light. Where was its God, its young master?

  Shh! Harry hushed. It’s okay, boy! It’s all right! Shh!

  He moved to the forefront of the handful of onlookers, saw a young boy kneeling there in the gutter, his cheeks shiny with tears, the broken pup dead in his arms. One of the pup’s shoulders was askew and its spine kinked; its right foreleg flopped like a rubber band; its crushed head oozed brain fluid from a torn right ear.

  Harry got down on one knee, put an arm round the boy, and stroked the dead pet. And again: “Shh, boy!” He comforted both of them. And in his mind the pup’s whines and yelps quietened to a panting whimper. It could feel again. It felt Harry.

  But the boy couldn’t be comforted. “He’s dead!” he kept moaning. “He’s dead! Paddy’s dead! Why didn’t the car hit me and not Paddy? Why didn’t the car stop?”

  “Where do you live, son?” Harry asked the boy, a towhead of maybe eight or nine.

  The other glanced at him through blurred-blue eyes. “Down there.” He nodded vaguely over his right shoulder. “Number Seven. We live there, Paddy and me.”

  Harry took the dog gently into his arms and stood up. “Let’s get him home, then,” he said.

  The
crowd parted for them and Harry heard someone say, “It’s a shame. What a terrible shame!”

  “Paddy’s dead!” The kid clutched the Necroscope’s elbow as they turned the corner into a narrow, deserted street.

  Dead? Yes, he was, but … did he really have to be? You don’t have to be, do you, Paddy?

  The deadspeak answer which came back wasn’t quite a bark and it wasn’t quite a word—but it was an agreement. A dog will usually agree with his friends, and rarely if ever disagree with his master. While Harry wasn’t Paddy’s beloved master, he certainly was a new friend.

  And the decision was made as quickly as that.

  Before they reached the small garden in front of Number Seven, Harry looked down at the lad and said: “What’s your name, son?”

  “Peter.” The other could scarcely get it out past his tears and the lump in his throat.

  “Peter, I—” Harry jerked to a halt. Playacting for all he was worth, he glanced at the pet in his arms. “I think I felt him move!”

  The boy’s mouth fell open. “Paddy moved? But he’s so bad hurt!”

  “Son, I’m a vet,” Harry lied. “Maybe I can save him. You run quickly now and tell your people what’s happened, and I’ll take Paddy to the surgery. And whatever happens, I’ll be in touch just as soon as I know how bad he is—or how good. Okay?”

  “But—”

  “Don’t waste time, Peter,” Harry urged. “It’s Paddy’s life, right?”

  The other gulped, nodded once, flew to the gate of Number Seven and through it, and as he vanished pell-mell into the garden Harry conjured a Möbius door. By the time Peter’s ma came out of the house wringing her hands—came flying to see the vet—Harry was at a different address entirely …

  The Necroscope had perhaps too few friends among the living, but one of them was an old potter up in the Pentlands who fired his own kilns. Paddy was absolutely dead, no doubt about that, when Harry handed him over to Hamish McCulloch for calcination in one of his ovens.

  “It’s worth a twenty to me, Hamish,” he told the old Scot, “if you can bring him down to ashes. Well, if not to me, to his master, a young lad with a broken heart. And I’ll pay you for one of your pots, too, to keep him in.”

  “I reckon we can manage that, Harry,” Hamish said, nodding.

  “Only one thing,” said the Necroscope, “be careful how you gather him up. I mean, the young lad wants to know he has all of him, right?”

  “Just as you say,” and another nod. And Harry waited for five hours until the job was done, but stayed calm and patient and controlled throughout. For now he was the old Harry, who, while he had little enough time left of his own, nevertheless had all the time in the world for this.

  And anyway, it would serve his wider purposes, too, wouldn’t it? A little preview of what was to come? A chance to observe any possible … discrepancies? For Trevor Jordan’s brain had also been shattered, and Penny’s flesh had been torn.

  At 10:00 P.M. Harry was down in the spacious, dusty cellar of his old house a mile or so out of Bonnyrig. He’d cleaned the place out as best he could and scrubbed an area in the center of the stone floor until it was smooth as glass. Old Hamish had told him the weight of the dead pup’s body before calcination, so that even if Harry’s grasp of math was meager it wouldn’t be too difficult to calculate pound for pound the various amounts of chemicals required. His knowledge was anything but meager and he’d calculated it down into grams.

  Finally, ashes and chemicals were poured together, making a very small mound in the scrubbed floor space, and Harry was ready. And this time there was no pausing to check if his own personal mind-flea was up and jumping, for this time he wasn’t worried for himself but a little kid who wouldn’t be sleeping easy tonight.

  Except now that he was ready it all seemed so ridiculously easy. Was this all there was to it? Had he perhaps forgotten something? Had those weirdly esoteric words he’d uttered down in the bowels of Janos Ferenczy’s ruined castle—that formula out of hideous eons—really sufficed to bring about … resurrection?

  And if so, had it been an act of blasphemy?

  On the other hand, where was the profit in worrying about that now? If the Necroscope was to be damned for his works, then he was already damned. And purgatory has to be something like infinity: if you’re to suffer for all eternity, there’s no way you can be made to suffer twice as long. Is there?

  As always his arguments went in a circle, making his head spin. But suddenly he “knew” that it was the vampire in him, working to confuse him, and in that same moment he acted and so broke the threat. Directing a rigid finger and his thoughts at the pile of ingredients, he spoke the words of evocation:

  “Y’ai ’Ng’ngah,

  Yog-Sothoth.

  H’ee-L’geb,

  F’ai Throdog

  —Uaaah!”

  It was like putting a lighted match to a pile of incendiary materials: there was phosphorescent light, colored smoke, a not-quite-sulphur stench. And there was a yelp!

  Paddy, called up from his ashes, came staggering from a mushrooming smoke ring of rapidly dispersing gas or vapor. His ears and stump of a tail were down, trembling, and he wobbled on legs of jelly which seemed incapable of supporting him. He had returned from death and weightlessness—from incorporeity—to life and substantiality in a moment, but his pup’s legs were already unused to it.

  “Paddy,” the Necroscope whispered, going down on one knee. “Paddy—here, boy!” And the little dog fell down, stood up, shook himself so as to almost fall again, and came to him.

  Black and white, short in the leg, floppy-eared, a mongrel entirely—and entirely alive!

  … Was he?

  Paddy, the Necroscope spoke again, this time in deadspeak. But there was no answer.

  Paddy lived. Truly.

  Half an hour later Harry delivered Paddy to house Number Seven of a row of neat terraced houses in Bonnyrig. He didn’t mean to stay, would escape immediately if he could, but there were things he needed to know. About Paddy. About Paddy’s character. Was he the same dog exactly?

  And apparently he was. Certainly Peter thought so. Paddy’s master had been ready for bed for an hour, but he wouldn’t go until he’d heard from his “vet.” And Paddy’s return was a miracle to him, though only the Necroscope knew how much a miracle.

  Peter’s father was a tall, thin, callused man, but a kind one. “The boy told us he thought Paddy must be dead,” he said, pouring Harry a liberal whisky, after Peter and his pup had disappeared for the night. “Broken bones, blood and brains from his ear, a spine all out of joint—it had us worried. He loves that pup.”

  “It looked a lot worse than it was,” Harry answered. “The pup was unconscious, which made his limbs flop; there was some blood from a few scratches, and that always looks bad; and he’d coughed up some slaver. Shock, mostly.”

  The other raised an eyebrow. “And his shoulders? Peter said they weren’t working, that they were definitely broken.”

  “Dislocated,” Harry said. “Once we fixed that, everything else came right.”

  “We’re grateful to you.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “What do we owe you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s very kind of you …”

  “I just wanted to be sure that Paddy was the same dog,” said the Necroscope. “I mean, that the bump he took hasn’t changed his personality. Did he seem the same to you?”

  There came a yelp and a bark, and laughter from Peter’s bedroom.

  “Playing,” the boy’s mother said, and smiled understandingly. “They shouldn’t be, but tonight’s special. Oh, yes, Mr … . ?”

  “Keogh,” said Harry.

  “Oh, yes, Paddy’s just the same.”

  Peter’s father saw Harry to the garden gate, thanked him again, and said good night. When he went back inside, his wife said: “What an uncommonly decent, nice person. His eyes, so soulful!”

  “Hmm?” He
r husband was thoughtful.

  “Didn’t you think so?”

  “Oh, aye, certainly. But—”

  “But? Didn’t you like him, then? Is there something you can’t trust in a man who won’t accept payment for a job well done?”

  “No, no, it’s not that! But his eyes …”

  “Soulful, weren’t they?”

  “Were they? Down at the garden gate, in the darkness, when he looked at me—”

  “Yes?”

  But: “Nothing,” said Peter’s father, shaking his head. “A trick of the light, that’s all …”

  Back home Harry felt good. Better than at any time since Greece, when he’d got his deadspeak and numeracy back. Maybe he could feel even better, and cause others to feel better, too.

  In his study he sat in an easy chair and talked to an urn where it stood shadowed in one corner of the room. Or it would appear that he talked to an urn, but urns don’t talk back:

  “Trevor, you were a telepath and a good one. Which means that you still are. So I know that even when I don’t speak to you, still you’re listening to me. You listen to my thoughts. So … you know what I did tonight, right?”

  I can’t help what I am, Harry, Trevor Jordan answered, his deadspeak voice “breathless” with excitement. No more than you can. Yes, I know what you did—and what you’re planning to do. I can’t believe it yet, and don’t suppose I will for quite some little time after it has happened, if it happens. It’s like a wonderful dream that I don’t want to wake up from. Except there’s a chance it will be even more wonderful when I do wake up. There was no hope, none, and now there is …

  “But surely you knew my intention all along?”

  Knowing what someone wants to do doesn’t make him capable of doing it, the other answered. But now, after the dog …

  Harry nodded. “But a dog’s a dog, and a man’s a man. We still can’t be sure until … we’re sure.”