Necroscope

this way had always proved to be vitally important.

And on this occasion:

He had seen himself seated at Keenan Gormley's desk, going through his papers one by one. The top right- hand desk drawer was open; the papers and files on the desk in front of him had come from there. Gormley's massive security filing cabinet stood as yet undisturbed against the wall of his office; its three keys were lying on top of the desk where Kyle had tossed them. Each key would open a tiny drawer in the cabinet, and each drawer had its own combination lock. Kyle knew the combinations and yet had not bothered to open the cabinet. No, for that which he sought was right here, in these documents from the drawer.

As if realisation of that fact had galvanised the image of himself where it sat in Gormley's chair, Kyle had then seen himself pause abruptly as he came to a certain file. It was a yellow file, which meant that it concerned a prospective member of the organisation. Someone 'on the books', as it were. Someone Gormley had had his beady eye on. Perhaps someone with a real talent.

As that thought dawned, so Kyle took a step towards himself where he sat. Then, dramatically, as was always the case, his alter-image at the desk had looked up, stared at him, and held up the file so that he could read the name on the cover. The name was 'Harry Keogh'.

That was all. That had been the point where Kyle had started awake. As to what the thing had meant or was supposed to signify — who could say? Kyle had long since given up trying to predict the meaning of these glimpses, other than the fact that they had meaning. But in any case, if something could be said to have brought him here today, it would have to be that brief and as yet inexplic able 'dream' before waking.

As yet it was still fairly early in the morning. Kyle had beaten the first rush of heavy traffic in London's streets by just a few minutes. For the next hour or more all would be chaos out there, but in here it was quiet as the proverbial tomb. The rest of the admin team (all three of them, including the typist!) had been given today and tomorrow off out of respect for the dead man, so the offices upstairs would be completely empty.

In the tiny foyer Kyle had pressed the button for the elevator, which now arrived and opened its doors. He entered and as the doors closed behind him he took out his pass-card, sliding it easily and smoothly through the sensor slot. The elevator jerked but made no upward movement. Its doors opened, waited for a long moment, closed again. Kyle frowned, glanced at his card and silently cursed. It had run out yesterday! Normally Gormley would have renewed its validity on the branch computer; now Kyle would have to do it himself. Fortunately he had Gormley's card with him, along with the rest of his office-related effects. Using the ex-Head of Branch's pass-card, he coerced the elevator into carrying him to the top floor, going through a similar procedure to let himself into the main suite of offices.

The silence inside was almost deafening. High up above the level of the street, with soundproofed floors to shut out hotel noises from below and double-glazed, tinted windows for additional privacy, the place seemed set in a sort of vacuum. The feeling crept in that if you listened to that silence long enough, it would become hard to breathe. It was especially so in Gormley's room, where someone had been thoughtful enough to draw the blinds at the windows. But the blinds had jammed only a little more than half-way shut, so that now, with bands of light coming in through the green-tinted windows, the entire office seemed decorated in a horizontal, sub-marine pinstripe. It made this once familiar room strangely alien, and it was suddenly very odd and unreal not to have the Old Man here…

Kyle stood in the doorway, staring into the office for long moments before entering. Then, closing the door behind him, he stepped to the centre of the room. Several hidden scanners had already picked him up and identified him, in the outer offices as well as in here, but a monitor screen in the wall close to Gormley's desk wasn't satisfied. It beeped and printed up:

SIR KEENAN GORMLEY IS NOT AVAILABLE AT PRESENT. THIS IS A SECURE AREA. PLEASE IDENTIFY YOURSELF IN YOUR NORMAL SPEAKING VOICE, OR LEAVE IMMEDIATELY. IF YOU FAIL TO LEAVE OR IDENTIFY YOURSELF, A TEN SECOND WARNING WILL BE GIVEN, FOLLOWING WHICH THE DOOR AND WINDOWS WILL LOCK AUTOMATICALLY… REPEAT: THIS IS A SECURE AREA.

Feeling irrationally aggressive towards the cold, unthinking machine, and not a little perverse, Kyle said nothing but waited. After a count of three the screen wiped itself clean and printed up:

TEN SECOND WARNING COMMENCES NOW… TEN… NINE… EIGHT… SEVEN… SIX…

'Alec Kyle,' said Kyle grudgingly, not wishing to be locked in.

The machine recognised his voice pattern, stopped counting, commenced a new routine:

GOOD MORNING, MR KYLE… SIR KEENAN GORMLEY IS NOT -

'I know,' said Kyle. 'He's dead.' He stepped to the desk keyboard and punched in the current security override; to which the machine replied:

DO NOT FORGET TO RE-SET BEFORE YOU LEAVE, and switched itself off.

Kyle sat down at the desk. Funny world, he thought. And, funny bloody outfit! Robots and romantics. Super science and the supernatural. Telemetry and telepathy. Computerised probability patterns and precognition. Gadgets and ghosts!

He reached into a pocket for his cigarettes and lighter, came out with both items and also the keys to Gormley's security cabinet. Without thinking, he tossed the keys on to an empty corner of the desk. Then he paused and stared at them lying there, forming a pattern — the pattern from this morning's glimpse into the future. Very well, let's go from there.

He tried the drawers of the desk. Locked. He took out Gormley's notebook from the inside pocket of his overcoat, checked the code. It was OPEN SESAME.

Unable to suppress a chuckle, Kyle punched OPEN SESAME into the desk keyboard and tried again. The top right-hand drawer slid open at a touch. Inside, papers, documents, files…

And here comes the funny bit, he thought.

He took out the papers and placed them in front of him on the desk. Leaving the drawer open (his 'glimpse' again), he began to check through the documents, placing each one back in the drawer in its turn. He knew that by now his talent shouldn't really surprise him any more, but it always did — and so he gave a small involuntary start as he arrived at the yellow file. The name on the cover was, of course, Harry Keogh.

Harry Keogh. Apart from Kyle's dream, that name had only ever come up once before: in an ESP game he had used to play with Keenan Gormley. As for this file: he had never seen it before in his life (his conscious life, anyway) and yet here he sat staring at it, exactly as in his dream. It was a very creepy feeling. And -

In the dream he had held the file up to himself. Now the thought set the act in motion. Feeling foolish — not understanding why he did it, but at the same time feeling his skin charged with alien energy — he held up the file to the empty room, as if to a ghost from his own recent past. And just as a thought had triggered the action, now the action triggered something else — something away and beyond all of Alec Kyle's previous experience or knowledge.

God almighty! Gadgets and ghosts!

The room had been comfortably warm just a moment ago. Centrally heated, the offices were never cold. Or should not be. But now, in a matter of seconds, the temperature had plunged. Kyle knew it, could feel it, but at the same time he retained enough of instinctive reasoning to wonder if perhaps his own body temperature had also taken a tumble. If so, it wouldn't be hard to explain. This must be what shock felt like. No wonder people shivered!

'Jesus Christ!' he whispered, his breath pluming in the suddenly frigid air. The file fell from his twitching fingers, slapped down on the desk. The sound of its falling — that and what he saw — galvanised Kyle into an almost spastic reaction of motion. He jerked back in his chair, causing its legs to ride through the pile of the carpet, tilting it backwards until it slammed against the window sill and rebounded.

The — apparition? — the thing, where it stood half-way between the door and the desk, hadn't moved. At first Kyle had thought (and had dreaded the thought) that it could only be himself he saw standing there, somehow projected forward from the dream. But now he saw that it was someone — something — else. Not once did it enter his mind to question the reality of what he was seeing, and not for a moment did he consider it to be anything other than supernatural. How could it be anything else? The scanners where they constantly swept the room, the entire suite of offices, had detected nothing. Entirely independent, if they had picked up anything at all intruder buzzers would be going off right now, and getting louder by the minute until someone sat up and took notice. But the alarms were silent. Ergo, there was nothing here to scan — and yet Kyle saw it.