Necroscope IV: Deadspeak

'Yes,' Harry lied.

'And the information you picked up? Where is that?'

'It wasn't there. That's why I waited all night, to collect it this morning. But it still wasn't there.'

Eugen turned around in his seat and stared at Harry with narrowed eyes. 'You are being very open, my friend. I take it this all has to do with our peasant fifth-columnists, right?'

Harry tried to look frightened, which wasn't at all hard. He knew nothing about Romania's peasant fifth- columnists, but he did understand something of the psychology of thugs such as these. 'Something like that,' he said. 'But… you said you have a room at the airport? Well, I think I'd rather tell you everything now, than have comrade Corneliu here beat it out of me in private later.'

'A great shame,' Corneliu grunted, and shrugged. 'Still, I might beat you anyway.'

Eugen said: 'You will show us this letter drop?'

'If it will make life easier for me, yes,' Harry answered.

'Hah!' scoffed Corneliu. This one, tough?' And to Harry: 'Are they all girls, your British spies?'

Harry shrugged. In fact he knew very little about standard British spies, only about espers: mindspies.

Eugen turned the car around and backtracked; there was no more conversation until Harry called a halt at the entrance to the graveyard. 'It's in here,' he said then. 'The letter drop.'

They all got out of the car and Corneliu used his gun to prod Harry on ahead. As he went he sent his deadspeak before him: We're here. One of them at least has a gun — trained on me. In the moment that he sees you he'll be distracted. That's when I plan to disarm him. Is everything OK?

We're OK, Harry, the Zaharias answered at once. And there are several others who wouldn't be dissuaded. We don't know if they'll be much good. But… strength in numbers, eh?

I don't see you, Harry looked worriedly all about. Are you in hiding?

The others are just under the soil, Harry, Ion Zaharia told him. And we're out of our boxes, in our sarcophagus.

Harry remembered: the Zaharias had been buried in the same plot and had a joint sarcophagus, its heavy, beautifully veined lid standing some eighteen inches above the surrounding marble chips of their plot. They hadn't seemed to mind him sitting there for a few moments while he was talking to them. So, they were waiting under the lid, eh? Well, and that should come in very handy.

'Move, Keogh!' Corneliu growled, shoving him forward down an aisle between rows of leaning headstones. 'Where is this drop, anyway?'

'Right there,' Harry pointed ahead. He moved to the huge tomb and stood looking down at its massive lid. 'I had to lever it to one side, but together we should slide it easily enough, once we lift it from its groove.' He hoped that the thugs hadn't noticed how ripe the air was, and how much worse the smell was growing from second to second, but this was something he dare not ask.

'Oh?' Eugen grinned mirthlessly. 'Desecration, too, eh? Why, you should be ashamed of yourself, Harry Keogh, posting letters to the dead! They can't answer you, you know.' And to Corneliu: 'You hold your gun on him, while I give him a hand.'

How wrong you are! Harry thought, as he and the tall agent strained at the lid — which suddenly, and very easily, slid to one side. The Necroscope had expected that, certainly, and held his breath; but Corneliu and Eugen had not, and didn't. Nor were they expecting what happened next, in the moment after the tomb's trapped gasses whooshed out.

'God!' Eugen staggered back, his hands flying to his nose and mouth. But Corneliu, standing back a little, simply gasped and bugged his eyes. And the weapon in his hand seemed to automatically transfer its aim from Harry's back to what was first sitting up, then standing, and finally reaching out from the shadowy mouth of the tomb!

Before he could squeeze the trigger, if indeed sufficient strength remained for that, Harry broke his wrist with a kick he seemed to have been saving for years. The gun went flying, and so did Corneliu — directly into the burned and blistered, blue and tomb-grey hands of the Zaharias! The brothers grabbed and held him, stared at him with their dead bubble eyes, and threatened him with blackened bone teeth in straining, scorched cartilage jaws.

The other agent, Eugen, gibbering as he crashed through the ancient bramble-grown plots towards the graveyard's exit, didn't even pause to look back… until he ran into what was waiting for him. Those others of whom the Zaharias had reported: 'they wouldn't be dissuaded'. And for all that they were mainly fragmentary — or possibly because that's what they were — these crumbling, crawling, spastically kicking parts of corpses stopped Eugen dead in his tracks.

One of them was a woman, whose legs and life had been lost in a terrible accident. Long-buried, her breasts were rotting onto her belly, sloughing away from her in grotesque lumps; but still she stood upright on her stumps and found a supernatural strength to cling to Eugen's shuddering thighs where he danced and screamed to heaven for mercy, and tried to push her face away from his midriff. Finally he succeeded and the vertebrae of her neck parted; her entire head flopped over backwards like that of a broken doll, as if it were hinged, exposing maggots where they seethed in her throat and fed on ravaged flesh and torn tendons.

With a series of frenzied leaps and kicks born of the sheer terror of his situation, at last Eugen freed himself from the dead woman's crumbling torso and reached inside his jacket. He brought out an automatic pistol and cocked it, turning it upon others of these impossibly animated parts where they came crawling or jerking towards him. Harry didn't want that gun to go off; Eugen's screams were bad enough; gunshots might easily attract investigators.

The dead picked up Harry's concern as surely as any spoken word and moved to dispel it. The pile of loathsomeness which was the legless woman struggled upright and toppled itself against Eugen's weapon, and her mouldy hands drew its barrel into the trembling jelly cavity of her neck. With her trunk she deadened the sound of Eugen's first shot, while Harry saw to it that there wouldn't be a second one.

Coming upon the agent from behind and clenching his manacled hands, he rabbit-punched him unconscious, and as he fell kicked the gun from his hand. Collapsing, Eugen saw Harry's face fading slowly into darkness, and wondered why nothing of horror was written in his strange, soulful eyes.

Regaining consciousness a few minutes later, the tall, awkward secret policeman was sure that what he'd experienced had been a vivid and especially terrifying nightmare… until he actually opened his eyes and looked around. Then:

'My God! Oh… my… God!' he burst out. For a moment his eyes bulged, and then he closed them again — tightly.

'Don't faint,' Harry warned him. 'I've only so much time left and there are things I want to know. If I don't get the answers I need, these dead people will probably be angry — with you!'

Eugen kept his eyes closed. 'Harry… Harry Keogh!' he finally gasped. 'But these people… they're dead!'

'I just said they were,' Harry told him. 'You see, that's where your 'friends across the border' made their mistake. They told you who I am but not what I am. They didn't tell you how many friends I have, or that they're all dead.'

The other mumbled something in Romanian, began to gibber hysterically.

'Calm down,' Harry told him at once, 'and speak English. Forget that the people holding you are dead. Just think of them as my friends, who'll do anything they have to in order to protect me.'

'God — I can smell them!' Eugen wailed, and Harry suspected that he wasn't getting through to him. He hardened.

'Look, you were going to hand me over to the KGB — who in turn would have tortured me for things they want to know, then killed me! So why should I go easy on you? Now you can get a grip on yourself and start answering my questions, or I give up on you, get out of it and leave you here with them.'

Eugen struggled a little, then sat very still as the movements he'd made stirred up fresh waves of tomb- stink. He could feel dead, rubbery fingers holding his arms. His eyes were still tightly closed. 'Just tell me one thing,' he said. 'Am I mad? God — I can't breathe.'

'That's another thing,' Harry told him. 'The longer you're here, with my friends, the more chances you're