Necroscope

They know you, Harry,' she answered. 'At least, they

know of you. You're the one who befriends the dead. Through you, the dead have a future — some of us, anyway. Through you, there's a chance some of us can finish the things we never finished in life. They look to you as a hero, Harry, and they too worry for you. Without you there's nothing left for their hopes, you see? They… they beg you to give up this obsession, this vendetta.'

Harry's mouth hardened. 'You mean Shukshin? I can't do that. He put you where you are, Ma.'

'Harry, it's not… not so bad here. I'm not lonely any more, not now.'

He shook his head and sighed. 'That won't work, Ma. You're only saying that for my sake. It only makes me love and miss you more. Life's a gift and Shukshin stole it from you. Look, I know it's not a good thing I'm doing — but neither is it unjust. After this it will be different. I have plans. You did give me a talent, yes, and when this is finished I'll use it well. That's a promise.'

'But this thing with Viktor comes first?'

'It has to.'

'That's your last word?'

'Yes.'

She nodded sadly, freed herself and stepped away from him. 'I told them that would be your answer. All right, Harry, I won't argue it any further. I'll just go now and let you do what you must. But you should know this: there will be warnings, two of them, and they won't be pleasant. One comes from the others, and you'll find it here in this dream. The other waits in the waking world. Two warnings, Harry, and if you fail to heed them… it will be on your own head.'

She began to drift away from him, between the towering headstones, the mist lapping at her ankles, her calves. He tried to follow her but couldn't: invisible dream-stuff

stood between; his feet seemed welded to the gravel chips forming the graveyard's paths.

'Warnings? What sort of warnings?'

'Follow that path,' she pointed, 'and you'll find one of them there. The other will come from someone you'd do well to trust. Both are indications of your future.'

'The future's uncertain, Ma!' he called after her mist-wreathed ghost. 'No one sees it clearly! No one knows for sure!'

Then call it your probable future,' she answered. 'Yours, and also the futures of two others. Someone you love, and someone who asked for your help…'

Harry wasn't sure he'd heard right. 'What?' he yelled at the top of his voice. 'What's that, Ma?'

But her voice and figure and mind had already merged with the swirling mist of the dream and she was gone.

Harry looked the way she had pointed.

The headstones marched like giant dominoes, towering markers whose tops were lost in billowing clouds of fog. They were ominous, brooding, and so was the path between them which Harry's mother had pointed out to him. As for her 'warnings': maybe it was better if he didn't know. Maybe he shouldn't walk that way at all. But he didn't have to walk: his dream was taking him that way anyway!

Harry drifted unresisting along the gravel path between ranks of mighty tombstones, drawn by some dream- force which he knew could not be denied. At the end of the avenue of markers there was an empty space where the mist alone swirled and eddied, a cold and lonely place, and beyond that -

Three more markers, but somehow more ominous than all the others put together. Harry drifted across the empty space straight towards them, and as he approached them

where they towered up out of the earth, so the dream-force gently set him down and gave him back his volition. He looked at the headstones and the mist which half-obscured them slowly lifted. And Harry read the warning his mother's 'others' had left for him carved in deep, geometrically rigid characters in their surfaces. The first stone said: BRENDA COWELL

BORN 1958

SOON TO DIE IN CHILDBIRTH SHE LOVED AND WAS LOVED GREATLY

The second one said: SIR KEENAN GORMLEY

BORN 1915

SOON TO DIE IN AGONY FIRST AND FOREMOST A PATRIOT

And the third one said: HARRY KEOGH

BORN 1957 THE DEAD SHALL MOURN HIM

Harry opened his mouth and shouted his denial: No!'

He stumbled back from the looming markers, tripped, threw wide his arms to break his fall -

— And knocked over a tiny bedside table. For a long moment he lay there, shocked from sleep, his heart hammering against his ribs, then gave a second great start as his telephone rang!

It was Keenan Gormley. Harry flopped shivering into a chair with the phone to his ear. 'Oh,' he said. 'You'.

'Am I that much of a disappointment, Harry?' the other asked, but with no trace of humour in his voice.

'No, but I was sleeping. You sort of shocked me awake.'

'Oh, well I'm sorry for that. But time is passing us by, and-'

'Yes,' said Harry, on impulse.

'Eh?' Gormley sounded surprised. 'Did you say yes?'

'I mean: yes I'll join you. At least, I'll come to see you. We'll talk some more about it.' Harry had been considering Gormley's proposition for some time, just as he had promised he would; but in fact it was his dream, which of course had been more than just a dream, that finally decided him. His mother had told him there was someone he'd do well to trust, someone who had asked for his help. Who could that be but Gormley? Until now his joining Gormley's ESPers had been fifty-fifty, he might and he might not. But now, if there was any way he could change what Mary Keogh had called his 'probable' future, his and Brenda's and Gormley's, then -

'But that's wonderful, Harry!' Gormley's excitement was obvious. 'When will you come down? There are so many people you must meet. We've so much to show you — and so much to do!'

'But not just yet,' Harry tried to put the brakes on. 'I mean, I'll come down soon. When I can…'

'When you can?' now Gormley sounded disappointed.

'Soon,' Harry said again. 'As soon as I've finished… what I have to do.'

'Very well,' said the other, a little deflated, 'that will have to do. But Harry — don't leave it too long, will you?'

'No, I won't leave it too long.' He put the phone down.

The phone was no sooner in its cradle than it rang again, even before Harry could turn away. He picked it up.

'Harry?' It was Brenda, her voice very small and quiet.

'Brenda? Listen, love,' he said before she could speak. 'I think… I mean, I would like… what I'm trying to say is…oh, hell! Let's get married!'

'Oh, Harry!' she sighed into her end, the sound and the feeling of her relief very close and immediate in his ear. 'I'm so glad you said that before — before — '

'Let's do it soon,' he cut her short, trying hard not to choke on his words as once more he saw, in his mind's eye, the legend on Brenda's marker as it had appeared to him in his dream.

'But that's why I called you,' she said. 'That's why I'm glad you asked me. You see, Harry, it was looking like we were going to have to anyway…'

Which came as no surprise at all to Harry Keogh.

Chapter Twelve

It was mid-December, 1976. Following one of the longest, hottest summers on record, now Nature was