Necroscope V: Deadspawn

'Well, and doubtless that was of value at the time. But as I said, things change. I will get back to you about him — one way or the other — in good time. But until then… was there anything else?'

'One small thing.' Clarke kept his tone neutral but scowled at the 'phone. 'About Paxton…'It was a leaf straight out of Harry Keogh's book, and it worked just as well for Clarke.

'Paxton?' (He actually heard the Minister catch his breath!) Then, more cautiously, perhaps curiously: 'Paxton? But we're no longer interested in him, are we?'

'It's just that I was reading through his records,' Clarke lied, 'his progress reports, you know? And it seemed to me we lost a good one there. Is it possible you've been maybe a bit too thorough? A shame to lose him if there's a chance we can bring him on. We really can't afford to waste talents like his.'

'Clarke,' the Minister sighed, 'you have your side of the job, and I have mine. I don't question your decisions, do I?'

Don't you?

'And I really would appreciate it if you wouldn't question mine. Forget about Paxton, he's out of it.'

'As you wish — but I think I'll at least keep an eye on him. If only from a distance. After all, we're not the only ones in the mindspy game. I'd hate it if he were recruited by the other side…'

The Minister was getting peeved. 'For the moment you have quite enough work on your plate!' he snapped. 'Leave Paxton be. A periodic check will suffice — when I say so!'

Clarke was only polite when people were polite to him. He was far too important to let himself be stepped on. 'Keep your shirt on… sir,' he growled. 'Anything I say or do is in the Branch's best interest, believe me — even when I step on toes.'

'Of course, of course.' The other was at once conciliatory. 'But we're all in the same boat, Clarke, and none of us knows everything. So for the time being let's just trust each other, all right?'

Oh, yeah, let's! Sure! 'Fine,' Clarke said. 'I'm sorry I've taken up so much of your time.'

'That's all right. We'll be speaking again soon, I'm sure…'

Clarke put the 'phone down and continued to scowl at it a while, then sealed the envelope containing the police reports and scrawled Harry Keogh's address on it. He erased his and Keogh's recent conversation, then asked the switchboard if they'd traced the call. They had and it was Harry's Edinburgh number. He 'phoned it direct but got no answer. And finally he called a courier into his office and gave him the envelope.

'Post it, please,' he said, but before the courier could leave: 'No, repackage the whole thing and send it off special delivery. And then forget you ever saw it, right?'

In a little while he was alone with his dark, suspicious thoughts again, and an itch between his shoulderblades which he couldn't quite get at.

And his mother's ditty about fleas, which was equally persistent.

3 Changeling

Harry Keogh, Necroscope, didn't know Darcy Clarke's ditty, but he did have a flea on his back. Several, in fact. And they were biting him.

Geoffrey Paxton was only one and probably the least of them, but because he was reachable and immediate he was the most frightening. Harry wasn't frightened of Paxton, rather of what he might do to Paxton if he lost control. And of what losing control might conceivably do to him, to the Necroscope himself. He knew how easy it would be to betray himself and reveal that he was no longer an innocent but that some great and as yet undeveloped (but developing, certainly) Darkness had entered him.

That was what Paxton was looking for, Harry knew: proof that the Necroscope was no longer a fit citizen or habitant of Earth — no longer, indeed, a man, not entirely — but an alien creature and a monstrous threat. And when he knew it for sure, when there was no longer any doubt, then Paxton would report that fact and there would be war. Harry Keogh versus The Rest. The rest of Mankind. And that was the last thing Harry wanted, to be at odds with a world and its peoples which he had fought so long and so hard to keep safe.

Paxton, then, was a flea on Harry's back, a niggle at the edge of — attempting to dig its way deeper into — his mind, an irritation. And because Paxton's presence was representative of an even greater threat, which must ultimately challenge the Necroscope's very existence, it was something Harry could well do without. For to the Wamphyri the single 'honourable' answer to any challenge may only be written in blood!

Wamphryri!

The word itself was… a Power.

It was a tingling in the core of his being, an awareness of passions beyond the feeble, fumbling emotions of men, a savage, explosive nuclear energy contained — but barely — in his seething blood. It was a chain-reaction which was happening to him even now, whose catalyst was blood. And in itself it, too, was a challenge. But one which he must resist, which he must not, dare not answer. Not if he desired to remain ascendant and for the most part human.

A flea, then, this Paxton. An invader who would stick his proboscis in that most private and inviolable of all human territories, the mind itself, and siphon out its thoughts. A spy, a thought-thief- a parasite come to sup on Harry's secrets — a flea. But only one flea of several, and not one whose bites he could afford to scratch.

Another unbearable itch was the fact that the dead — the Great Majority of mankind, who yet lay apart from and unknowable to mankind, with the sole (the soul?) exception of Harry Keogh — were withdrawing from him. He was losing his rapport; the change in him had wrought a change in them. Their trust was weakening.

Oh, there were many among them who owed him beyond their means to repay, and many more who had loved him for his own sake, to whom the Necroscope had always been the one glimmer of light in an otherwise everlasting darkness, but even these were wary of him now. For when he had been simply Harry — unsullied and unsullying, innocent and gentle — why, then it had been a marvellous thing that he could touch the dead and they touch him! But all of that was yesterday.

And now that he was more than Harry? There are certain things which even dead men fear, and limits to what even they will lie still for…

Since the destruction of Janos Ferenczy and his works, Harry had been busy. Other than the constant irritation of Geoffrey Paxton the only intrusion he'd allowed — the single distraction from his purpose, because he had no control over it — was the knowledge that a necromancer lived and practised his abominations in England. It distracted him because Penny Sanderson was now his friend (his ward, even?) and because he was privy to what she and others like her had gone through.

Of the fact that the forces of law and order would track down and apprehend Penny's torturer, murderer, and then violator eventually, Harry had little doubt; but they would never charge him with the full range of his offences, because they had no yardstick by which to measure them. They neither knew nor were capable of defining a full range of offences, not in this case. And certainly there was no punishment which would fit the crime. Not in law.

But the Necroscope fully understood the nature of this beast and his crimes, and his ideas of punishment were rather more stringent. Even before his contamination he'd had that. It was a flame which had been sparked in him by the murder of his own sweet mother, and which burned just as lively to this day. An eye for an eye.

As to what Harry had been doing since removing the last of the Ferenczys forever from the world of men: his works had been weird and wonderful, and the thoughts in his Mobius mind even more so.

To begin with, he'd brought back Trevor Jordan's ashes from Rhodes. The incorporeal telepath had wished it (death might have some sort of meaning with Harry to talk to), but not even Jordan had suspected Harry's real purpose.

By themselves, however, the essential salts of a man were insufficient to put Harry's plan into action, not and achieve the entirely satisfactory result which he sought. Which was why, before reducing further the ruins of Janos Ferenczy's castle, the Necroscope had removed from them certain chemical substances by means of which