Harry and the Pirates_and Other Tales from the Lost Years Page 9

  The next morning Harry was late rising. Some few minutes after eight thirty the sun was well up, the morning steadily growing warmer. Jimmy Collins had already left, gone to continue and/or finish his rewiring job; but he had left the kettle full of hot water which would take but a moment to bring to the boil. This was good, because the Necroscope was eager to proceed with his own kind of work and had precious little time to waste.

  Over coffee and cereal for breakfast, he contacted his dear mother where her remains lay in mud and weeds on the bed of a river in Scotland near a property where once she’d lived. He might have contacted her sooner but had wanted to avoid explaining the nature of his current investigations. Though many years dead, Mary Keogh was invariably, though not unnaturally, concerned for her son’s welfare in a frequently hostile world.

  Now, however, asking his ma’s help seemed the next logical step. And coming straight to the point Harry requested that she enquire among the teeming dead in north-eastern burial grounds, to see if she could find someone who knew of one Janet Symonds, late of Harden Colliery, presumed murdered and illegally interred in an unmarked grave some fifteen years ago. After beseeching him to take care, Mary said she would see what she could do and get back to him as soon as possible.

  With their conversation at an end, Harry went out into the garden. And with his eyes narrowed, his mind shielded, he gazed west; shielded because he knew that somewhere beyond the garden wall lay horror in the shape of a thing that should not be. For last night in his sleep, the Necroscope’s subconscious mind had recognised or remembered an occurrence which ordinarily, during waking hours under normal circumstances, should have been apparent as it happened—if it had occurred during waking hours—which he now desired to prove one way or the other: either as a dream or as reality.

  It had to do with his mastery of the Möbius Continuum; the fact being that whenever Harry established co-ordinates for new locations, their points of reference then remained as permanent fixtures in his metaphysical mind along with myriad locations he had used previously. And, since all a Möbius co-ordinate was was a location at an established distance in a known direction, once “fixed” it became immutable except perhaps for the negligible effect of magnetic shift, the minute creep of the planet’s tectonic plates, or gravitic anomalies caused by the inexorable but ages-long carouselling of stars on the galactic rim.

  Last night, however, the rules had been—or had seemed to be—broken; and now, as the Necroscope thought back on it, not for the first time. Indeed, yestereve’s confrontation with whatever it was in the forest had been Harry’s third; and since the unknown woodlands evil seemed to have intimate connections with the final resting places of any number of exanimate persons who continued to protest however feebly against some kind of forced confinement . . . then how was it that the Necroscope had detected the source of that evil in three separate locations? Co-ordinates don’t move.

  Harry was reminded, however paradoxically, of the title of a chapter in a macabre novel he’d read as a schoolboy: “For the Dead Travel Fast,” or something similar—which was paradoxical insofar as the dead he was concerned with appeared to be moving slowly! Nevertheless and despite that the changes in the angles of the Necroscope’s lines of contact had been very small, still the deceased whisperers did seem to be travelling! Or, assuming that in their inanimate state they were in themselves incapable of motion, was it possible they were being . . . what, conveyed?

  It was a question which served to remind Harry of another story he’d read in his teens: “The Travelling Grave.” All very fascinating, not to mention disturbing, for it now appeared he had discovered a very slowly travelling grave of his own!

  And a mass grave at that. . . .

  Back inside the house, Harry obtained a number from the directory, called the village police post and at once recognised the voice that answered. “Constable Forester?” he said. “Jack? Good morning. It’s Harry Keogh. . . .” And after a moment’s silence:

  “Oh?” Forester replied. “And what is it now? Are you still determined to waste my time, Mr. Keogh?”

  “A couple of questions, that’s all,” said Harry. “And they only require brief answers.”

  “Is that so?” said the other. “Well I’ll be holding you to that. And anyway you’ll have to be quick because I’m due out on patrol. You caught me on my way out the door.”

  “Okay,” Harry replied. “Briefly then. What is it you hope to catch Greg Miller doing up there, in Hazeldene? I mean, it’s fairly obvious to me that you spend a lot of time watching him. And—”

  “—And you haven’t figured it out yet?” Forester’s voice was sour. “I’m working on the principle that one day I’ll catch him returning to the scene of the crime.”

  “Ah!” said Harry.

  “Also,” Forester continued, “I’d like to find out exactly what it is that this crazy bastard is hiding up there in those fields around the forest, and why!”

  “What he’s hiding?”

  “He buys these cheap holdalls, sausage bags from the charity shops. I don’t know what he puts in them but I’ve sometimes seen him with one up there on the edge of Hazeldene. Of a morning he’ll have a sausage bag with him . . . come the evening when he goes back home to his run-down place just outside the village towards Hartlepool, the bag will have disappeared. It’s happened three or four times that I know of, but I’ve never been able to discover how he disposes of them. It’s possible he buries them, but . . .” The constable paused—

  “—But that’s enough. And now I have to go.”

  “Wait!” said the Necroscope. “One more question. You told me you sometimes feel very low up in the fields near Hazeldene. But have you ever noticed a strange smell? I mean, like a—I don’t know—like a sad sort of odour? More a feeling or sensation than a true smell? Something that somehow reminds you of things you’d rather forget? A sickly-sweet—”

  “—Like honeysuckle and shit?” Forester cut him off. “Two smells in one? Yes—and I don’t much like it. It has to be the forest, tree pollen and the like. Blackberry blossoms and crabapple, too. And the shitty stink is animal dung . . . well, probably.”

  Even though Forester couldn’t see him, Harry found himself shaking his head. “There are no blackberry blossoms—or crabapples, for that matter—not this early in the year,” he said. “In another two or three weeks, then maybe. But not just yet.”

  Harry sensed the other’s shrug—and that it was an uneasy shrug—more like an itch that the constable couldn’t get at to scratch. “Then it must be like I’ve said,” Forester said. “Just honeysuckle and shit.”

  “I suppose so.” The Necroscope nodded, if only to himself. And echoing the constable: “Well, probably.” At which:

  “Careful Harry,” said Forester. “Or you’ll wake up one day as crazy as Greg Miller.” With which he put the phone down. . . .

  And now it was time.

  Harry went back out into the garden and gazed west—seemingly at a solid brick wall but in fact through it, in order to “see” beyond it—then shuttered his eyes and used a deadspeak probe to scan afar. For one brief moment he found himself focussing upon a babble of faint, frightened voices in a pitch-black room . . . which in the next moment was gone, voices and parapsychologically conjured “room” alike, as the darkness in his mind withdrew and he opened his eyes to a bright summer morning. And Harry believed he knew what had happened.

  Whatever the connection was between the forest thing and a number of dismayed dead people—whether it was their custodian or jailer, though the Necroscope was sure it was the latter—and whatever its physical shape might be and however strong its metaphysical abilities, it was certainly aware of him and since yesterday evening at the latest had made ready to shield itself and shroud its prisoners’ voices at the slightest indication of his presence!

  As for Harry’s convictions with regard to its nature: the briefest of brief contacts on this occasion had been sufficient to reinforc
e any previous, half-formed suspicions into the sure knowledge that it was evil. For in the instant of its departure he had felt that a switch had been thrown and a light turned on that dispelled the darkness and temporarily cleansed the psychic atmosphere of something alien and rotten.

  And if that unknown “something” wasn’t evil, then the Necroscope simply didn’t know what was. . . .

  Once again Harry’s intention had been to locate the source of the dead voices, and if they had been calling to him in person and not just crying out in some kind of psychic wilderness, he would have achieved his goal. In the Möbius Continuum he would have traced the voices to their co-ordinates as easily as finding a lost child crying in a room in a sprawling mansion. As it was, however, Harry now knew the direction—the latest direction—of the voices and their tormentor, but not the distance. Gauging that would have to be an effort of trial and error.

  Leaving the garden by the back gate and making a series of line-of-sight Möbius jumps, he moved to the cover of a hedgerow some hundred yards south of the derelict Bellingham’s Farm and there paused to consider his options. The comparative “silence” of the metaphysical atmosphere by no means indicated a lack of activity on the part of the living; there could be couples out walking, picnickers in the fields, perhaps a gamekeeper in the vicinity. And as usual Harry’s need to keep his talents secure from public knowledge was uppermost.

  So perhaps it was time he employed the Möbius Continuum in a new if somewhat alarming way that he had been considering for some time. For after all, what better way to observe the lie of the land than from a bird’s-eye viewpoint? And if by some freak of chance a ground-based observer should happen to glance up at the sky, and if Harry didn’t linger on high for too long—not that the latter was likely; the branch of physics that governed gravity wasn’t about to ignore his physical presence—he might even be taken for a bird or a kite broken free of its string.

  And without more ado he chose a spot in the sky—in fact one occupied by the tiny speck of a hovering skylark—and used the Möbius Continuum to go there.

  For a moment the Necroscope stood still on the air, scanning the land below, his gaze sweeping north and south along the eastern edge of Hazeldene. And attracted by movement, the first thing he spied was Jack Forester’s police vehicle bumping along a farmland track. That told him what else to look for, and the next thing he saw—a little less than two hundred yards ahead of the constable’s car and much closer to the ominous green of the forest, in a field where the track petered out at the edge of a deep ditch—was a lone figure with the sling of a holdall over one shoulder!

  Greg Miller? It could well be.

  These things Harry saw and then he was falling, with the rush of his descent belling his trousers, tugging at his shirt, and filling his eyes with tears. At that moment, any other man would have been fearfully aware of Death’s rapid approach; but the Necroscope wasn’t like any other man. And concentrating on the mutating equations of exotic Möbius formulae, he used them to conjure a door directly beneath his hurtling figure and let himself fall through it. . . .

  And in the next moment, steadying himself, he stepped from the Continuum into the co-ordinates of his previous location by the hedgerow. In all, it had been a flight of just two or three seconds’ duration; but in that time Harry had seen everything he could have hoped for, at least for now, and his unique mind had recorded several new co-ordinates.

  He could now afford to take a moment or two and let Miller enter the woods, then follow close behind him in a Möbius jump. He would be well ahead of Jack Forester, with his vehicle stuck at the ditch, and hot on the heels of Miller, still heading in the direction of his brief contact with his unknown quarry. In fact it now appeared likely that Miller was following the same trail, albeit by some means unknown to the Necroscope. Perhaps the man had developed some kind of rapport with the forest entity, evidence of which Harry had witnessed when first he became aware of this dark alien incursion. Or then again, Miller might simply be following—

  —Following his nose?!

  For there it was again: that smell, that indefinable odour that was more a melancholy feeling or perception, that reminded the Necroscope of . . . but of what? Of every sad thing that ever happened to him? Every worried, anxious, sleepless night he had ever spent? It felt as if a dark cloud had passed over the sun, and the entire weight of the universe was pressing down on him. Except this time Harry knew it was no coincidence, knew that it was connected to Greg Miller—definitely to Jack Forester and something in Hazeldene Forest—and now to himself. And he knew if he let it take over, take control, that he couldn’t say what it might make him do. Because his life seemed so utterly pointless with this great black cloud hanging over him.

  What, on a bright summer day?

  For deep down inside Harry knew that it was a lie; he knew that life wasn’t pointless, that he had purpose, especially now that he was so close to an answer to all of this. And he knew a place where he’d be safe and free of whatever was doing this to him, probably to Greg Miller, and most certainly to Jack Forester: a place called the Möbius Continuum, where whatever it was couldn’t possibly follow him, but from where he could pursue it to whatever end was waiting. . . .

  The Necroscope conjured a door, toppled himself through it, and immediately felt an effect, or rather twin effects: one of negative gravity in the weightlessness of the Möbius Continuum, the other a sense of relief in his instantaneous freedom from alien pheromones whose message had been one of suicide. Then, growing angry as he wondered whom that weird biological miasma had been fashioned to target: himself, Forester, or Miller—or maybe all three of them?—Harry sped to the co-ordinates where he’d seen the latter entering the forest.

  And there was Miller, frozen in an attitude of listening—or perhaps of sensing?—just a few paces ahead of him. But as Harry had stepped from the Continuum into the gloom of the forest, so the other had heard the crackle of twigs breaking under his feet. Crouching down, Miller spun in a half circle, causing his heavy hold-all to fly up and throw him off balance.

  As Miller lurched, so the Necroscope grabbed the hold-all, yanking on it to keep the surprised man out of kilter. Also, he stuck his foot out to trip the other up, then fell to the leaf-mould floor with him. And with a hand clamped on Miller’s mouth to stop him from crying out, he whispered, “Quiet now! I’m here to help you. I believe what I know of your story, and I think I know what you’re trying to do. But we have to keep it quiet. We don’t know who or what is listening, and our mutual friend Jack Forester isn’t far behind us.”

  Miller grabbed Harry’s hand and dragged it from his face. He shook his head and said, “No, you don’t know what I’m doing; you can’t know! All you’re doing is interfering, and I’ve never been as close as this before. So whoever you are—” He blinked rapidly, frowned, and looked puzzled. “—and however you’ve managed to follow me so quietly, don’t get in my way now! In fact, why don’t you just get the hell away from me?” But for all that his response was negative, still he’d kept his voice low, which at least told the Necroscope something of just how close Miller thought they must be.

  “But close to what?” Harry wondered out loud, which simultaneously questioned both Miller’s cryptic comment and his own thoughts. And as the other shook his head again—this time in obvious frustration—he quickly added, “Because I can sense it too! I sense it, smell it, and I even know what it wants of me: that I should kill myself! But what the hell is it?”

  At which Miller’s eyes widened; he’d read the truth in the Necroscope’s words, his voice. He grabbed Harry’s wrist, sat up, and reached for his hold-all. Its zipper had burst open when it hit the ground and its contents were exposed: a vicious-looking chain saw, and a plastic container full of a liquid whose unmistakable smell lingered on from a recent filling. It was petrol, fuel for the chain saw.

  Glaring at Harry, Miller repeated his question. “What the hell is it? This thing? Well why the hell do
you think I’d need a chain saw, eh? I mean, what does one do with a chain saw?”

  Harry shrugged, and answered, “You can cut wood, even soft metal if the saw has the right kind of teeth.”

  “Metal, no,” said Miller, licking dry lips. “Wood, yes . . . except I don’t even know if it is wood! I mean, I can’t see how it can be, and yet it looks like . . . like a fucking tree! Maybe not quite right but close enough to fool you until you’re right on top of it . . . or maybe right under it! So who knows? Who can say? But Jesus—as crazy and impossible a thing as it is—it eats human flesh!”

  “So you don’t know what it is,” said Harry, barely able to suppress a shudder as he got up, dusted himself down, and helped Miller to his feet. “But you do know where it is, right?”

  Miller shook his head. “That’s the trouble, you can never be sure. It . . . it moves! It moves slowly, but it moves. I told them where it had killed Janet—where we’d fallen asleep after making love—and where I’d woken up, seen what it was doing to her. Then . . . it had knocked me aside, out of its reach, unconscious, and I had lain there all day. They found Janet’s clothing okay but not the thing. When I finally worked it out . . . by then it was too late. I was locked up and no one was ever going to believe me. But since getting out I’ve never stopped looking for it. Chain saws? I’ve buried half-a-dozen chain saws all round Hazeldene, so I’ll be close to one if or when I find the thing. Wood? Sure, they’ll cut wood. But when I find that bloody thing—which could well be today—you can bet I’ll be cutting something other than wood!”

  Harry heard a car’s door being slammed. Turning and looking out into the open through smoky shadows pierced by shifting shafts of sunlight, he saw Jack Forester, hands on hips, standing beside his car on the far side of the drainage ditch. Maybe one hundred and fifty yards away, the constable peered left and right up and down the ditch. He was looking for the easiest way across, obviously.