Necroscope IV: Deadspeak

The Necroscope shrugged. 'Mushrooms, toadstools — fungi, anyway. The sun is steaming them away.'

He felt Faethor's shudder and could have bitten off his tongue. His last sentence had been thoughtlessly cruel. But… what the hell!… why should anyone feel sorry about the fate of a long-dead, morbid and totally evil thing like a vampire?

'Goodbye,' he said, heading out of Faethor's ruined house, back towards the graveyard and the dusty road beyond.

Farewell, that unquiet spirit answered him. And Harry, don't linger over what you must do but seek to make a quick end of it. Time may well be of the essence.

Harry waited a moment more but Faethor didn't elaborate…

As Harry climbed the rear wall of the old cemetery and stepped down among the plots and leaning slabs, someone very close to him said: Harry? Harry Keogh?

He jumped a foot and glanced all around. But… no one there! Of course not, for it was deadspeak at work — without the terrible mental agony he'd come to associate with it. He'd been denied the use of his macabre talent for so long that it would take a little time to get used to it again.

Did I startle you? asked the voice of some dead soul. I'm sorry. But we heard you talking to that dead Thing Who Listens, and we knew it must be you — Harry Keogh, the Necroscope. For who else among the living could it be, talking to the dead? And who else would even want to talk to or befriend such a Thing as that? Only you, Harry, who have no enemies among the Great Majority.

'Oh, I've a few,' Harry eventually, hesitantly answered. 'But mainly I get on with the teeming dead well enough, yes.'

Now the entire graveyard came, as it were, to life. Before, there had been a hush, an aching void to camouflage a pent-up… something. But now that something burst its banks like a river in flood, and a hundred voices suddenly required Harry's attention. They were full of the usual queries of the dead: how were those they'd left behind doing in the world of the living? What was happening in that bustling world of corporeal being, where minds were housed in flesh? Would it be possible for Harry to deliver a message to this oh so well-remembered and — loved father, or mother, or sister, or lover, and so on.

Why, he could spend a lifetime simply answering the questions and running the many errands of the inhabitants of this one cemetery! But no sooner had he issued that thought than they knew and recognized its truth, and the mental babble quickly died down.

'It isn't that I don't want to,' he tried to explain, 'but that I can't. You see, to the living you're dead and gone forever. And apart from a handful of colleagues, I'm the only one who knows you're still here, but changed. Do you think it would help if all your still living friends and loved ones knew that you, too, remained… extant? It wouldn't. It would only serve to make their grief that much worse. They'd think of you as being in some vast and terrible prison camp beyond the body! Well, it's bad enough, I know, but not that bad — especially now that you've learned to communicate among yourselves. But we can't tell that to the living you left behind you, for if we did those who've stopped mourning and returned to what's left of their own lives, why, they'd start all over again! And I'm afraid there would always be fake Necroscopes to take advantage of them.'

You're right, of course, Harry, their spokesman answered then. It's just that it's such a rare — indeed unique — treat, to speak with a member of the living, I mean! But we can sense your urgency and we certainly didn't intend to hold you up.

Harry wandered amidst the plots, some ancient and others quite new, and inquired: 'How will it affect you? When they get through levelling what's left around here, I mean? You'll still be here, I know that, no matter what happens — but won't it bother you that your graves have been disturbed?'

But they won't be, Harry! an Area Planning Council member, late of Ploiesti, spoke up. For this cemetery has a preservation order on it. Oh, it's true, a lot of graveyards have been reduced to rubble, but this one at least escapes Ceausescu's madness. And I pride myself that I was in part instrumental — but I had to be. Why, members of my family, the Bercius, have been buried here for centuries! And families should stick together, right? Radu Berciu chuckled, however wrily. Ah, but I never thought that I'd benefit personally, or at least not so soon. For just nine days after I brought that preservation order into being, why, I myself died of a heart attack!

Harry was thoughtful enough to enquire: 'Are there any more here only recently dead?' For he knew from past experience that they'd be the ones hardest hit, not yet recovered from the trauma of death. At least he could find the time to speak to them before moving on.

And eventually a pair of voices, sad, young, and very lost, found strength to answer him:

Oh, yes, Harry, said one. We're the Zaharia brothers.

Ion and Alexandru, said the other. We were killed in an accident, working on the new road. A tanker crashed and spilled its fuel where we were brewing tea on a brazier. We burned. And both of us with new wives. If only there were some way to let them know that we felt nothing, that there was no pain.

'But… there must have been!' Harry couldn't disguise his astonishment.

Yes, one of the Zaharias answered, but we'd like them to believe there wasn't. Otherwise they could stay awake every night for the rest of their lives, listening to us scream as we burned. We'd like to spare them that, at least.

Harry was moved, but there was nothing he could do for them. Not yet, anyway. 'Listen,' he said. 'It could be that I may be able to help — not now but at some time in the future. Soon, I hope. If and when that time comes I'll let you know. Right now, though, I can't promise you any more than that.'

Harry, they tried to tell him in unison, their voices overlapping, that's more than enough! You've given us hope, in that we now know we have a friend in a place otherwise beyond our reach. All of the teeming dead should be so lucky. And indeed they are lucky — that you're the one with the power.

He moved on, out of the cemetery and into the dusty road, turning right in the direction of Bucharest. Behind him the excited graveyard voices gradually faded, talking among themselves now, of him rather than to him. And he knew he'd made a lot of new friends. A mile down the road, however, he met two who were not his friends. On the contrary.

The black car passed him heading where he'd just been, but hearing the sudden squeal of its brakes he looked back and saw it make a rocking U-turn. And from that moment he felt he was in trouble. Then, as the car drew up alongside and stopped, and as its occupants jumped out, he knew he was in trouble.

They weren't in uniform, but still Harry would know their sort anywhere. He'd met them before; not these two in particular, but others exactly like them. Which wasn't strange for they were all very much of a kind. In their dark grey suits and felt hats with soft rims — which might have been borrowed right out of the Thirties — they were the Romanian equivalent of Russia's KGB: the Securitatea. One was small, thin, ferret-faced; the other tall, wooden and lurching. Their faces were almost expressionless, hidden in the shade of their hats.

'Identity card,' the small one growled, holding out a hand and snapping his fingers.

'Work ticket,' said the other, more slowly. 'Papers, documents, authorization.'

They had both spoken English, but Harry was so badly taken by surprise that he fell straight into their simple trap. 'I… I have only my passport,' he said, also in English, and reached for it in his inside jacket pocket.

Before he could produce his forged Greek passport, the small, thin one thrust an ugly automatic pistol into his side. 'Carefully, if you please, Mr Harry Keogh!' he rasped. And as Harry's hand came back slowly into view, so the document was snatched from him and passed to the larger of the two.

Then, while the small one expertly frisked him, the wooden one opened up his passport and studied it. After a moment he held it out where his comrade could glance at it without looking away from Harry; they both grinned, coldly and without humour, and Harry thought how well they imitated sharks. But he also knew they had him, and for now there was nothing he could do about it.

The last time anything like this had happened to him was when he'd first gone to speak with Mobius in a Leipzig cemetery. On that occasion he had made his escape through the Mobius Continuum. Also, he'd made use of an expert and practical knowledge of the martial arts, taught to him by several dead masters. Well, and he was still