Necroscope IV: Deadspeak

died. But I got to know her… later. And I miss her. A boy's best friend is his mum, you know? And… well, I have a lot of friends down there.'

'In the ground?'

'Yes. Hell, we had some good conversations!'

Bettley almost shuddered, fought it down. 'You miss talking to them?'

'They had their problems, wanted to air their views, wondered how things had gone in the world of the living. Some of them worried a lot, about people they'd left behind. I was able to reassure them. But most were merely lonely. Merely! But I knew what it was like for them. I could feel it. It was hell to be that lonely. They needed me; I was somebody to them; and I suppose I miss them needing me.'

'But none of this explains your dream,' the doctor mused. 'Maybe it has no explanation — except fear. You've lost your friends, your skills, those parts of yourself that made you unique. And now you're afraid of losing your manhood.'

Harry narrowed his eyes a little and began to pay more attention; he looked at Bettley more piercingly. 'Explain.'

'But isn't it obvious? A disembodied female Thing — a dead thing, a vampire thing — devours your core, the parts of you that make you a man. She was Fear, your fear, pure but not so simple. Her vampire nature was straight out of your own past experience. You don't like being normal and the more you have to endure it the more afraid of it you get to be. It's all tied up to your past, Harry: it's all the things you've lost until you're afraid of losing anything else. You lost your mother when you were a child, lost your own wife and child in an unreachable place, lost so many friends and even your own body! And finally you've lost your talents. No more Mobius Continuum, no more talking to the dead, no more Necroscope…'

Harry was frowning now. 'What you said about vampires made me remember something,' he said. 'Several things, in fact.' He went back to rubbing his brow.

'Go on,' Bettley prompted him.

'I have to start some way back,' Harry continued, 'when I was a kid at Harden Modern Boys. That's a school. I was a Necroscope even then, but it wasn't something I much liked. It used to make me dizzy, sick even. I mean it came naturally to me, but I knew it wasn't. I knew it was very unnatural. But even before that I used to… well, see things.'

Bettley was an empath; now he felt something of what Harry felt and the short hairs began to rise at the back of his neck. This was going to be important. He glanced down at a button on his side of the desk: it was still red, the tape was still running. 'What sort of things?' he asked, hiding his eagerness.

'I was an infant when my stepfather killed my mother,' the other answered. 'I wasn't on the scene, and even if I had been I wasn't old enough for it to impress me. I couldn't possibly have understood what was happening, and almost certainly I wouldn't have remembered it. And I couldn't have reconstructed it later from overheard conversations because Shukshin's account of the 'accident' had been accepted. There was no question of his having murdered her — except from me. It was a nightmare I used to have: of him holding her there under the ice, until she drifted away. And I saw the ring on his finger: a cat's-eye set in a thick gold band. It came off when he drowned her and sank to the bottom of the river, and fifteen years later I knew where to go back and dive for it.'

Bettley felt a tingling in his spine. 'But you were a Necroscope — the Necroscope — and read it out of your dead mother's mind. Surely?'

Harry shook his head. 'No, because it was a dream I had from a time long before I first consciously talked to the dead. And in it I 'remembered' something I couldn't possibly remember. It was a talent I'd had without even recognizing it. You know my mother was a psychic medium, and her mother, too? Maybe it was something that came down from them. But as my greater talent — as a Necroscope — developed, so this other thing was pushed into the background, got lost.'

'And you think all of this has something to do with this new dream of yours? In what way?'

Harry's shrug was lighter, no longer defeatist. 'You know how when someone goes blind he seems to develop a sixth sense? And people handicapped from birth, how they seem to make up for their deficiencies in other ways?'

'Of course,' the doctor answered. 'Some of the greatest musicians the world's ever seen have been deaf or blind. But what…?' And then he snapped his fingers. 'I see! So you think that the loss of your other talents has caused this… this atrophied one to start growing again, is that it?'

'Maybe,' Harry nodded, 'maybe. Except I'm not just seeing things from the past any more but from the future. My future. But vaguely, unformed except as nightmares.'

It was Bettley's turn to frown. 'A precog, is that what you think you're becoming? But what has this to do with vampires, Harry?'

'It was my dream,' the other answered. 'Something I'd forgotten, or hadn't wanted to remember, until you brought it back to me. But now I remember it clearly. I can see it clearly.'

'Go on.'

'It's just a little thing,' Harry shrugged again, perhaps defensively.

'But best if we have it out in the open, right?' Bettley spoke quietly, clearing the way for Harry without openly urging him on.

'Perhaps.' And in a sudden rush of words: 'I saw red threads! The scarlet life-threads of vampires!'

'In your dream?' Bettley shivered as gooseflesh crept on his back and forearms. 'Where in your dream?'

'In the green stripes where the light came through the blinds,' Harry answered. 'The stripes on her belly and thighs, in the moment before that hellish thing fastened on me. They were green-tinted, almost submarine, but as my blood began to spurt they turned red. Red stripes streaming off her body into the dim past, and also into the future. Writhing red threads among the blue life-threads of humanity. Vampires!'

The doctor said nothing, waited, felt the other's horror — and fascination — washing out from him, welling into the study like a sick, almost tangible flood tide. Until Harry shook his head and cut off the flow. Then, abruptly, he stood up and headed a little unsteadily for the door.

'Harry?' Bettley called after him.

At the door Harry turned. 'I'm wasting your time,' he said. 'As usual. Let's face it, you could be right and I'm frightened of my own shadow. Self-pity, because I'm nothing special any more. And maybe scared because I know what could be out there waiting for me, but ' probably isn't. But what the hell — what will be will be, we know that. And the time is long past when I could do anything about it or change any part of it.'

Bettley shook his head in denial. 'It wasn't a waste, Harry, not if we got something out of it. And it seems to me we got a lot out of it.'

The other nodded. 'Thanks anyway,' he said, and closed the door behind him. The doctor got up and moved to his window. Shortly, down below, Harry left the building and stepped out into Princes Street in the heart of Edinburgh. He turned up his coat collar against the squalling rain, tucked his chin in and angled his back to the bluster, then stepped to the kerb and hailed a taxi. A moment later and the car had whirled him away.

Bettley returned to his desk, sat down and sighed. Now he was the one who felt weak; but Keogh's psychic essence — a near-tangible 'echo' of his presence — was already fading. When it had faded into nothing, the empath rewound his interview tape and dialled a special number at INTESP HQ in London. He waited until he got a signal, then placed the handset into a cradle on the tape machine under his desk. At the press of a button, Harry's interview began playing itself into storage at E-Branch.

Along with all of his other interviews…

In the back of the taxi on the way to Bonnyrig, Harry relaxed and closed his eyes, leaned his head against the seat and tried to recall something of that other dream which had bothered him on and off for the last three or four years, the one about Harry Jnr. He knew what the dream was in essence — what had been done to him, how and why — but its fine detail eluded him. The what and how part was obvious: by use of the Wamphyri art of fascination, hypnotism, Harry Jnr had made his father an ex-Necroscope, at the same time removing or cancelling his ability to enter and manoeuvre in the Mobius Continuum. As to why he'd done it:

You would destroy me if you could, he heard his son's voice again, like a record played a hundred times, until he knew every word and phrase, every mood and emotion or lack of it, by heart. Don't deny it, for I can see it in your eyes, smell it on your breath, read it in your mind. I know your mind well, father. Almost as well as you do. I've explored every part of it, remember?