by Brian Lumley
Then, one morning three or four days after Moggit had gone missing, Johnny got up early. He didn’t know it, but Carol was awake and throwing her clothes on as soon as she heard his door gently opening and closing. Her brother (she always put a heavy sneering accent on the word) had been getting up early a lot recently—hours before the rest of the household—and she wanted to know what he was doing. It wasn’t especially malicious of her, but the fact was she was a little jealous and more than a little curious. Even if Johnny was a pig, still she’d rather have him playing with her in the pool than off on his own playing his stupid, mysterious, lonely games.
As for Johnny: his time was all his own now and no one to make demands on it. School was out for the summer holidays; he had “things” to do; he could usually be found beyond the garden wall, in the hedgerows where they blended into meadow and farmland that stretched out and away to the north and northwest. But he would always come when he was wanted (a loud call would usually bring him home directly), and he was sensible about getting back for mealtimes.
Just what he did out there all the hours of the day was something else. If his foster parents asked him, he would say, “Playing,” and that was all. But Carol wanted to know what it was he played at. It was beyond her that he could find anything more interesting than the pool. So she went out after him, tiptoeing past her parents’ door, into the early morning light where dawn hadn’t long cracked the horizon with its golden smile.
Johnny went down past the pool under its polythene blister to the garden wall. He climbed the high wall at a well-known spot, jumped down the last few feet on the other side. And he started out along the overgrown hedgerow into the maze of fields shimmering in the morning light. And Carol right after him.
Half a mile into the fields, at a junction of ancient, rutted, overgrown tracks, the jumbles of a ruined farm lay humped and green with flowering brambles and clumps of nettles, where sections of broken, grey-lichened wall and the buttressed mass of an old chimney poked up in teetering stacks of stone. Johnny cut diagonally through a meadow and only his dark head, shiny with sweat, could be seen above the tall, swaying grass.
From where she balanced precariously on top of a disused stile, Carol saw where he was heading and resolved to follow him. The old ruin was obviously Johnny’s secret place, where he played his secret games. But they wouldn’t be secret much longer.
Johnny had disappeared somewhere into the tumble of fallen, weed-grown walls by the time his sister came panting out of the meadow. She paused awhile and looked this way and that, along the tracks which had once serviced the farm, then made to cross them to the ruins … and paused again!
What was that? A cry? The cry of a cat? Moggit?
Moggit!
Carol’s hand flew to her mouth. She drew a gasping breath and held it. What, poor little Moggit, lost somewhere in the shell of this crumbling old pile? Maybe that was what had drawn Johnny here: the sound of Moggit, jammed in some hole, trapped and starving in this tottering ruin.
Carol thought to call out in answer to Moggit’s strange, choking cries and maybe bring him a little hope; but then she thought no, for that would only make him struggle the harder and perhaps get himself in more of a fix. Maybe he was only crying like that, so urgently and piteously, because Johnny was already trying to rescue him.
Holding her breath, Carol crossed the hard-packed, dusty tracks to what once would have been a wide entrance through high farmyard walls to the cluster of buildings within. Now the gap was a mass of collapsed stone choked by brambles and bolting ivy, with a few hazelnuts and straggly elders crushed under the weight of parasitic green. Broken bricks and rubble shifted underfoot where a well-marked trail had been worn through the undergrowth, Carol supposed by Johnny.
Dusty and cobwebbed, the trail in through the foliage was almost a tunnel; the light was shut out; seven-year-old Carol felt stifled as she forced her way through. But when she might have faltered, Moggit’s howls (she was sure it must be Moggit, while at the same time praying it was not) drove her on. Until finally she broke cover into yellow sunlight, and blinking the grit out of her eyes saw Johnny where he sat in the central clearing. And saw the …
… The things he had there; but without really seeing them at first, because her child’s mind couldn’t conceive, couldn’t believe. And finally she saw … but no, no, there was no way that this could be Moggit.
What, Moggit of the snow-white belly and paws, the bushy tail and Lone Ranger masked face, the sleek, gleaming black back and neck and ears? This tortured, dangling thing, Moggit? Carol almost fainted; she slumped down behind a broken wall and knocked loose a brick, and Johnny heard the clatter. When his head snapped round on his neck to look Carol’s way, he didn’t see her at first, only the ruins in the clearing as he’d always known them. But Carol still saw him: his bloated face, bulging, emotionless eyes, and bloody, claw-like hands. His penknife lying open beside him on the wall where he sat, and the sharpened stick with its red point clutched tight in one hand.
And she still saw Moggit, too. Moggit with his hind paws just touching the ground, feebly dancing to stay upright and keep his weight off his neck, which was encircled by a thin wire noose that hung down from the branch of an elder! And one yellow eye hanging out on a thread, dribbling wetly and dancing on his wet furry cheek even as Moggit danced; and his fat white belly thin and crimson now where it had been slit open to let a bulge of shiny black, red, and yellow entrails dangle!
And Moggit wasn’t all. There were two of Carol’s father’s favorite pigeons, too, hanging limp from other branches with their wings twisted all askew. And a hedgehog still alive but with a rusty iron spike through its side, pinning it to the ground, so that it staggered dizzily round and around on its own axis in unending agony, snuffling horribly. Yes, and there were other things, too, but Carol didn’t want to see any more.
Johnny, satisfied that no one was there, had returned to his “game.” Through eyes that were brimming tears, Carol saw him stand up, catch a dead pigeon in one hand, and thrust his stick right through its clay-cold body. And he worked the stick in its unfeeling flesh almost as if … as if it wasn’t unfeeling at all! As if he really believed that the bedraggled, stiff, broken thing could feel it. And all the while he laughed and talked and muttered to these poor, tortured, alive or dead or soon to be dead creatures, caring nothing for their waking or sleeping agonies. Indeed, his sister now understood something of the nature of his game: that having harried a living thing to its death, Johnny couldn’t bear that it had escaped him and so continued to torture it in the lightless world beyond!
And at that she was the first to know the truth about her adopted brother, without even knowing she knew it. For a child herself, she recognized a child’s fancy when she saw one, knew also that Johnny was simply a cruel and hateful boy, and that what she’d imagined just couldn’t be.
But Moggit, poor Moggit! Finally, it got through to Carol that it was indeed her battered, half-eviscerated cat which Johnny was slowly hanging. And she could bear it no longer.
“Moggiiiit!” she screamed at the top of her voice. And: “Johnny, I hate you—oh, how I hate you!”
She stood up, stumbled and regained her balance, flew at him, clutching the jagged half of a brick. Johnny finally saw her and his red-blotched face rapidly turned pale. He snatched up his penknife—not to use on her but with an entirely different, perhaps even worse purpose in mind—and went to slice through a length of tough kite string which held down Moggit’s branch. Strands parted but the string didn’t; in a sudden rage Johnny jerked the string this way and that, and Moggit was lifted and whirled like a rag, his hoarse cat cries cut off as the wire bit into his rubbed-raw throat.
Then Johnny gave a gasp of triumph as his knife cut through the string, and Moggit was jerked aloft, choking and spitting for a second or two as the noose tightened to finish the job. But Johnny was so intent on the murder of the cat that Carol was on him. Blindly, whirling her arms, she came at him with the sha
rp nails of one hand and the half-brick grasped tight in the other. He avoided her raking nails, but a sharp, broken corner of the brick struck him on the forehead and knocked him down. In a moment he was sitting up, shaking his head, looking around for his knife. And his eyes blazed as he glared at his sister and threatened, “First Moggit, and now you!”
He got unsteadily to his feet, his forehead grazed and bleeding, then spotted his penknife and pounced on it. And in that same moment Carol knew she was in deadly danger. Johnny couldn’t let her tell her parents what she had seen, what he had done. And there was only one way he could be sure to stop her.
With a backwards glance that took in the whole scene one last time—poor Moggit hanged and bobbing with the motion of the elder branch, the hedgehog finally exhausted, gasping its life out where it lay, and the dead, mutilated birds strung up in a row—she turned away and fled for home. And bursting through the tunnel of undergrowth out of the ruins, she knew that Johnny was right behind her.
And he would have been; except he knew that if she got home first, she would bring someone to see. And he mustn’t let anyone see.
Quickly, he cut down Moggit and the birds and yanked the hedgehog’s stake from the ground. Panting from the furious pace of his exertions, and from his fury in general, he tossed the lot into a deep, stagnant well which he’d discovered on the site, whose battened cover had long since rotted away in one corner. He hated to see his dead and dying things go down into the dark like that, making splashes in the deep, black, unseen water below. Wasted, all of them, and so much “life” still left in them! It was all Carol’s fault. Yes, and there’d be a lot more to blame her for if she got home first.
He set out after her, following her wailing and the wild, zigzag trail she left through the long grass.
A half mile across rough, open countryside is a long way when you’re a heartbroken child with your eyes full of tears. Carol’s heart hammered in her breast and her breath was ragged and panting; but to drive her on there was always that picture burning on her mind’s eye, of Moggit dangling and jerking in the wire noose, with his guts hanging out like a small bag of crushed fruits when her mother made jam in the kitchen. And to drive her even faster was Johnny’s voice crying after her: “Caaarol! Carol—wait for me!”
She did no such thing; the garden wall was just ahead, at the end of the hedgerow; behind her, panting—and yet growling, too, like some savage dog—Johnny was catching up. His groping hand missed her ankle by inches as she half climbed, half fell over the wall. But on the garden side she just lay there, too terrified, tearful, too exhausted to go on.
And Johnny jumping down after her, his eyes mad and glaring, small fists tightening and slackening where he held them to his sides. She looked towards the house but it was hidden behind fruit trees and the misted dome of the pool. Would her parents be up yet? She didn’t even have the wind for yelling.
Johnny snarled as he bunched her hair in a strong fist and commenced dragging her towards the pool. “Swimming!” he said, the word bursting from his lips like a bubble of slime. “You’re going swimming, Carol. You’re going to like it, I know. And so am I. Especially afterwards!”
For the last week or so, David Prescott had also taken to getting up early. Alice didn’t complain or ask why, because he was always so quiet and considerate and invariably brought her a cup of coffee. It must be the summer, the light mornings, the old “early bird” syndrome. But in fact it was the mail.
Out this way the mail deliveries were always early, the very crack of dawn, and David was expecting a letter. From the orphanage. Not that it would contain anything of any significance—he was sure it wouldn’t—but still he’d like to get to it before Alice. If she saw it first … well, she’d only say he was paranoid. About Johnny. And certainly it would look as though he was, else why would he write to the orphanage about him?
The thing was, David was desperate that things should work out all right; he really did want to love the poor kid. But at the same time he’d always been more receptive of mood than Alice—more aware of the aura of people, especially kids—and he knew that Johnny’s aura just wasn’t right. If it was something out of his past (but what past? He was just a child), something the orphanage would know about, then David believed that he and his wife should be told. For he suspected Alice was right to complain about the attitude of the orphanage; they had seemed too eager to wash their hands of Johnny, or rather: “To place him in the care of a normal, loving family, where he can grow into a healthy person. Healthy in mind, as well as in body …”
That’s what the orphanage director had said the day they went to pick up their new son, and the words had always stuck in David’s memory. “Healthy in mind, as well as in body.”
Something wrong with Johnny’s mind? Something a little sick? Or a lot sick? For that was the nature of the aura which David sometimes felt washing out from the boy: a sick one, and clammy as an old man on his deathbed. Johnny felt sick as death. But not his death.
And this morning, sure enough the letter was there. David tore it open and read it, and for a little while the words made no sense. Budgerigars in the kids’ rooms, and Johnny stealing, killing, and collecting them? A collection of dead things: mice, beetles, the budgies, even a kitten?
A dead kitten under his bed, crawling with maggots, and Johnny twisting its legs until they came off in his hands? That was how the orphanage people had found out about it, when the other kids came screaming.
But a kitten?
Moggit … ?
Screaming?
And David could hear the horrified screams of those kids from here. Except it wasn’t those kids but one of his own—no, his own—Carol, from the bottom of the garden!
What … ?
And Alice’s sleepy, mumbling voice from upstairs, calling down, “Where’s the coffee? The kids are up early.”
And another scream from the garden, cut off gurglingly at its zenith.
David had ever been the one to leap to conclusions, often incorrectly. He did so now, and this time was right.
Down the garden path with his dressing gown flapping, yelling for Carol, hoarsely, like crazy. But no answer. And a small blurred figure inside the polythene dome, kneeling at the side of the pool. David burst in, it was Johnny kneeling there; he looked like he was trying to drag Carol out of the water. And she was floating there, facedown, arms limply outstretched, crucified on the blue, gently lapping water.
Johnny had been playing in the fields; he’d heard Carol’s screams and seen a man—dirty, bearded, dressed in rags—climbing the wall out of the garden. The man ran away across the fields and Johnny went to see what he’d been doing. Carol was in the pool and he’d tried to drag her out.
He told the story to David, to Alice, the police, anyone who wanted to hear it. And most of them believed him; even David half believed him, though he didn’t want him near anymore. And Alice probably believed him, though that would be hard to say for she wasn’t much good for anything from that time forward.
The police found a camp site in the ruins of the old farm and brought up a lot of rubbish from the well. Someone, person or persons, must have been living rough there, stealing from gardens and properties (David’s pigeons) in order to eat. It could be Gypsies (the hedgehog), or maybe a tramp. Hard to say. Chances were they’d get him or them eventually.
But they never did get anyone.
And Johnny went back to the orphanage …
Harry slept on and for a little while longer experienced Johnny Found’s dreams. Of course, he saw Found’s past only from the necromancer’s own point of view, which if anything was worse than the whole picture and more than sufficient to guarantee he had the right man. But eventually, Found’s excesses became too much—his dreaming memories of his own evil deeds a lurid litany of his inhumanity—by which time Harry’s hatred of him had grown into a rage.
Johnny Found had lived all his young life a monster and murderer and so far had got away wi
th it, but until recently his stepsister Carol had remained his single human victim. Between times he’d made do and played his unthinkable “games” with creatures dead of causes other than murder.
But as men and monsters alike mature, so their tastes also mature, and Johnny was no exception. Except … what grotesque form does maturity take in something rotten from the start?
Once, for entirely unthinkable reasons which even Harry Keogh couldn’t bear to contemplate, Found had taken a job in a morgue; only to be fired when his boss became suspicious. It was his dream about another job he’d had, however, this time in a slaughterhouse, which did the trick and, like the last straw, broke the Necroscope’s back.
That was when Harry had drawn back his shuddering telepathic probe, pulled out of Johnny’s mind, and let the man get on with his nightmaring. Except of course in Found’s case the nightmares could barely match up to the reality …
5
… AND FANCIES
And then the Necroscope had dreamed of Darcy Clarke, which was also a form of nightmare, for in it Darcy was dead and his voice came to Harry as deadspeak.
Even so it didn’t come clearly but was distorted, drifting, a thousand echoes coming together from all directions and combining to form a strange, out-of-sync sighing.
I couldn’t believe you would have done that to me, Harry, said Darcy when he’d established his identity. I mean, I knew the moment they killed me—when I saw that they actually could kill me, despite my guardian angel—that you were responsible. It could only have been something you did inside my head when you were in there. You killed off the thing that watched out for me, and so left me vulnerable. But I still can’t believe you would, and I still don’t know why. I thought I knew you, but I didn’t know you a damn!
This is just a dream, Harry answered him then. This is my conscience—while I still have one—giving me trouble because I protected myself at someone else’s expense. This is a nightmare, Darcy, and you’re not really dead. It’s just me blaming myself that I had to interfere inside your head. As for why I did it: to be sure that if you came up against me before I was out of here, then that you would be vulnerable. Because of all the talents in E-Branch, yours is the one that scares me most. It gives you the edge, makes you invincible. I could try to stop you again and again, and fail, but you would only have to pull the trigger once and I’d be a goner. And it wouldn’t be new to you—you could do it—for you’ve done it before.