Necroscope V: Deadspawn

terrible anger in him, which he needed to take out on someone. But Clarke knew that it wasn't directed at him, wasn't directed at anyone but simply required an outlet.

Quickly forcing himself between Harry and the special-duty officer, he grabbed the Necroscope's arms. 'It's OK, Harry,' he said, urgently. 'It's OK. It's just that these people see things like this all the time. It doesn't affect them so much. They get used to it.'

Harry got a grip of himself, but not without an effort of will. He looked at Clarke and growled, They don't see things like that all the time! No one's ever going to 'get used' to the idea that someone — something — could do that to a girl!' And then, seeing Clarke's bewildered expression: 'I'll explain later.'

He turned his gaze across Clarke's shoulder, and in a tone more nearly civil now — more civilized? — asked the officer, 'Do you have a notebook?'

Mystified — not knowing what was going on, just trying to do his job — the other said, 'Aye,' and groped in his pocket. He scribbled quickly as Harry fired Penny's name, address and family details at him. Following which, and looking even more mystified: 'You're sure about these details, sir?'

Harry nodded. 'Just be sure to pass on what I said, right? I don't want anyone to cover her face over. Penny always hated having her face covered.'

'You knew the young lady, then?'

'No,' said Harry. 'But I know her now.'

They left the officer muttering into his walkie-talkie and scratching his head, and went up into the courtyard and the fresh air. As they moved into sunlight Harry put on his dark glasses and turned up the collar of his coat. And Clarke said to him: 'You got something else, right?'

Harry nodded, but in the next moment: 'Never mind what I got — what have you got? Do you have any idea what you're dealing with?'

Clarke threw up his hands. 'Only that he's a serial killer, and that he's weird.'

'But you know what he does?'

Clarke nodded. 'Yes. We know it's sexual. A sort of sex, anyway. A sick sort of sex.'

'Sicker than you think.' Harry shivered. 'Dragosani's kind of sickness.'

That pulled Clarke up short. 'What?'

'A necromancer,' Harry told him. 'A murderer, and a necromancer. And in a way worse than Dragosani, because this one's a necrophiliac, too!'

Clarke somehow succeeded in grimacing and looking blank at the same time. Then: 'Refresh my mind,' he said. 'I know I should be getting something, but I'm not.'

Harry thought about it for a few moments before answering, but in the end there was no way to tell it other than the way it was. 'Dragosani tore open the bodies of dead men for information,' he finally said. 'That was his 'talent', just like you have yours and I have mine. Necromancy. It was his job when he worked for Gregor Borowitz and Soviet E-Branch at the Chateau Bronnitsy: to 'examine' the corpses of his country's enemies. He could read their passions in the mucus of their eyes, tear the truths of their lives right out of their steaming tripes, tune in on the whispering of their stiffening brains and sniff their smallest secrets in the gases of their swollen guts!'

Clarke held up a hand in protest. 'Christ, Harry — I know all that!'

The Necroscope nodded. 'But you don't know what it's like to be dead, and that's why you're not getting it. It's because you can't imagine what I'm talking about. You know what I do and accept it because you know it for a fact, but deep inside yourself you still think it's just too way out to think about. So you don't. And I don't blame you. Now listen.

'I know I always protested I was different from Dragosani, but in certain ways he and I were alike. Even now I don't like admitting it, but it's true. I mean, you know what the bastard did to Keenan Gormley — the mess he made of him — but only I know what Gormley thought about it!'

And now Clarke got it. He snatched air in a great gasp and felt the short hairs stiffen at the back of his neck as an irrepressible shudder wracked his body. And: 'Jesus, you're right!' he breathed. 'I just don't think about it — because I don't want to think about it! But in fact Keenan knew! He felt everything Dragosani did to him!'

'Right,' Harry was relentless. 'Torture is the necromancer's principal tool. The dead feel the necromancer working on them just like they hear me talking to them. Except unlike the living, there's nothing they can do about it, not even scream. Not and be heard, anyway. And Penny Sanderson?'

Clarke went pale in a moment. 'She could feel — ?'

'Everything,' Harry growled. 'And that bastard, whoever he is, knew it! So you see while rape is one thing, and bad enough when it's done to the living, and while necrophilia is something else, an outrage carried out upon the unfeeling dead, what he does hits new lows. He tortures his victims alive, then tortures them dead — and he knows while he's doing it that they can feel it! He uses a knife with a curved blade, like a tool for scooping earth when you're planting bulbs. It's razor- sharp and… and he doesn't use it for scooping earth.'

It had been Clarke's intention to stop at the guardroom and speak to the policemen there. But now, pale as a ghost, he reeled to the castle's low wall. Clutching its masonry for support, he gulped at the gusting air and fought down the bile he felt rising from the churning of his guts.

And: 'Jesus, Jesus!' he choked. For he could see it all now and there was nothing he could do to cleanse the picture from his mind's eye. Weird sex? God, what an understatement!

Harry had followed Clarke to the wall. The head of E-Branch looked at him sideways from a watery eye. 'He… he digs holes in those poor kids, then makes love to the holes!'

'Love?' the Necroscope hissed. 'His flesh ruts in blood like a pig's snout ruts in soil, Darcy! Except the soil can't feel! Didn't the police tell you where he leaves his semen?'

Clarke's eyes were swimming and his brow feverish, but he felt his nausea being replaced by a cold loathing almost as strong as the Necroscope's own. No, the police hadn't told him that, but now he knew. He looked out over the blurred city and asked: 'How do you know he knows they feel it?'

'Because he talks to them while he's doing it,' Harry told him, mercilessly. 'And when they cry out in their agony and beg him to stop, he hears them. And he laughs!'

Clarke thought: Christ, I shouldn't have asked! And you — you bastard, Harry Keogh — you shouldn't have told me!

With fury in his eyes, he turned to face the Necroscope… and faced thin air. A wind blew up the esplanade and tourists leaned into it, balancing themselves. Overhead, seagulls cried where they spiralled on a rising thermal.

But Harry was no longer there…

Later, with Clarke's help, Harry fixed it that Penny Sanderson would be cremated. Her parents wanted it, and it wouldn't hurt them that it was all a show. They wouldn't know it anyway: that Penny was already ashes when their tears fell on her empty box, before it slid away from them behind swishing curtains and became wood smoke.

Clarke hadn't wanted to do it but he owed Harry. For a good many things. And he wanted very badly to catch the maniac who had done this thing to Penny and too many other innocents. Harry had told him: 'If I have her ashes — her pure ashes, not damaged or spoiled by burned linen or charcoal — then I'll be able to talk to her any time I want to. And maybe she'll remember something important.' It had seemed logical at the time (if anything about the Necroscope could ever seem logical) and so Clarke had pulled strings. As the head of E-Branch he had that sort of power. But if he'd known the whole story of what had happened at the castle of Janos Ferenczy, in Transylvania, maybe he would have thought twice about it. And then not done it at all.

He certainly wouldn't have gone along with it if Zek Foener had stood firm on her first… accusation? Or if not an accusation, a premonition at least.

Zek was a telepath and as loyal to the Necroscope as they came. In the Greek islands at the end of the Ferenczy business, she'd had occasion to try and contact Harry with her mind, during the course of which something had shocked her rigid. But it had been a while before she could tell Clarke what it was. They had been on the island of Rhodes at the time, less than a month ago, and their conversation was still fresh in his mind.

'What is it, Zek?' he'd said to her, when he could talk to her in private. 'I saw that change come over your face when you contacted Harry. Is he in some sort of trouble?'

'No — yes — I don't know!' she'd answered, fear and frustration audible in her every word, visible in her