Deadspawn

by Brian Lumley

  For after all, Found knew that the other Penny was dead; he knew that this couldn’t be the girl he had violated. Still, his shock had been short-lived and Harry was disappointed. Also, he knew now that he was dealing with a very cool customer. Whether Found would be able to stay cool when confronted with what was on the cards for him … that was something else entirely.

  Leaving Johnny’s mind, the Necroscope leaned across the table a little towards Penny and quietly said, “I can see how badly shaken you are. I can feel it, too. I’m sorry, Penny, but just try to stay calm. It won’t be long now; when Found leaves I’ll go after him; you’ll stay here and wait for me. Okay?”

  She nodded and said, “You seem very … well, cold about all of this, Harry.”

  He shook his head. “Just determined. But you see, Found is cold, which might give him an advantage if I allowed myself to get too heated.”

  As he spoke, Harry saw two men enter the diner from the car park. They seemed ordinary enough but there was something about them. As they moved along the self-service bar collecting cold drinks, their eyes scanned the room, found the Necroscope and Penny in their booth, moved on. Harry went to probe their minds—and his telepathic probe at once came up against a wall of mental static!

  He withdrew immediately. At least one of these men was an esper, which mean E-Branch was closing in … on both Johnny Found and Harry Keogh! They probably wouldn’t try anything in here—maybe not even in the darkness of the car park—but in any case Harry didn’t want them on his trail. And they’d obviously figured out that if they followed Found they’d find the Necroscope, too. Now of all times he really couldn’t afford this sort of complication.

  Now, too, he remembered the car he’d seen tailing Found’s truck out of Darlington: an unmarked police car with … how many men aboard? Two or three? He’d thought they were all policemen but now knew better. Suddenly, coming from nowhere, he felt a growl rising in his throat. His Wamphyri side was reacting to the threat. Aware of Penny’s gaze, he stifled the growl at once.

  “Harry.” Her voice was concerned. “You’re very pale.”

  Fury, my love. “There’s something I must do,” he told her. “It will mean leaving you here—but only for a minute. You’ll be okay?”

  “In here, alone, with him?” Her eyes were huge and round.

  “There are fifty people in here,” he answered. And two of them at least are pretty sharp characters. “I promise I’ll be right back.”

  She touched his hand and nodded. “Then I’ll be okay.” But she avoided looking Found’s way.

  Harry stood up, smiled a robot’s smile at her, and went out into the night.

  At first, to anyone watching, it would appear that he’d been heading for the gents’ toilets, but as he passed close to the swinging glass doors of the exit he turned sharply and pushed through them—

  —And as soon as he was outside crouched down, breathed a mist, and moved wraith-like between the cars ranked as soldiers on the hardstanding. His Wamphyri senses guiding him, he went straight to the unmarked police car and approached it from the rear. There was a driver, a plainclothes policeman, with one elbow on the sill and a cigarette dangling from his lips where he sat silhouetted in a steel frame, looking out of his wound-down window into the darkness and breathing the mild night air.

  Exuding fog, the Necroscope moved like a low-slung spider—performed a weirdly loping limbo—to draw silently alongside the car. And then he stood up.

  The policeman’s jaw fell open in a gasp of astonishment as a shadow, coming from nowhere, blocked out the stars and flowed over him; his cigarette flew as the Necroscope hit him once, hard enough to send him sprawling across the passenger seat.

  He was out like a light, indeed like his cigarette, which Harry ground under his heel. Then he reached inside the car and snapped the key in half in the ignition. So much for that: they wouldn’t be following Johnny—or Harry—anywhere in this car. But to be doubly sure he took out Found’s steel-tube knife and drove it into the wall of a tire until it hissed air and sagged down onto its rim. But as he began to straighten up he glanced into the back of the car and froze.

  The Necroscope’s eyes were attuned to the night, which was his element. He could see into the back of the car just as clearly as in broad daylight. And there on the backseat, a bulky, ugly, dark-snouted shape which Harry knew at once: a flamethrower. And on the floor back there, the blued-steel glitter of a pair of loaded cross-bows. Loaded crossbows!

  Harry hissed and crouched down into himself. They were ready for him, all of them. It must be coming soon. Perhaps sooner than he’d anticipated. Bastards! And he was the one who’d showed them how!

  He attacked a second tire and grunted his satisfaction as it collapsed into extinction, then moved round the car and did a third. Following which he paused and drew a ragged breath, and forced himself to be calm, calm …

  He was trembling, but only trembling. No more hissing, snarling. Mere moments of violence, but they had acted as a safety valve on Harry’s awful pressure. As his mist began to thin he sighed his relief, stood more humanly erect, put away the knife, and headed back towards the diner …

  Mere moments—less than two, three minutes at most—but more than sufficient time that the menace of Johnny Found had got to Penny, canceling her former resolve to “be okay.” For she had known from the moment Harry left the glass doors swinging behind him and disappeared into the night that she would not be okay, not in the same enclosed space as this monster, not with fifty or five hundred people around her.

  Mere moments, yes, but enough time for Johnny to make up his mind that Penny would be The One. Obviously, the guy with the dark glasses hadn’t been with her, after all, and now she was on her own. What was more, she was aware that Johnny was interested; he could feel her avoiding his eyes, even avoiding his thoughts, his existence. And suddenly he wondered: Does she know me? But how could she possibly know him? What the fuck was going on here, anyway?

  He put aside his plate and placed his hands on the table, palms down, as if to push himself to his feet. And all the while he stared at Penny, willing her to look his way. She was looking his way, however obliquely, and saw him slowly rising. All the color fled from her face as she too rose, slid out of her booth, backed away from him. She collided with a fat man with a tray and sent milk, hot food, bread rolls flying.

  Johnny paced after her, smiling a deliberately feigned, surprised smile. It was as if he were saying, “What’s wrong? Did I startle you?” Anyone watching would think: What on earth is wrong with that girl? Is she drunk, on drugs? So pale! And that nice young man looking so surprised, so astonished.

  And that was the whole thing of it: Johnny Found did look like a “nice young man.” When Harry Keogh had seen him, he’d been surprised that he didn’t more nearly fit the bill. Medium height and blocky build; blond, shoulder-length hair; good, square teeth in a full mouth with a droopy, almost innocent smile … only his slightly sallow complexion marred the boy-next-door image. That and his eyes, which were dark and deep-sunken. And the fact that he lived in a pigsty. And that he was a cold-blooded ravager of both living and dead flesh.

  Penny blurted an apology to the gaping, spluttering fat man where he fingered his milk-soaked jacket, looked up and saw Johnny closing with her, turned and fled for the swing doors. Johnny glanced around at the dozen or so nearby patrons in their booths, shrugged and pulled a wry face, as if to say: “A weirdo … nothing to do with me, folks!” and calmly walked after her.

  But he was so intent on his act, and on following the girl into the night, that as he caught the still-swinging door on the in-swing and passed out through it he didn’t see the two sharp-eyed men starting to their feet and coming after him.

  Outside, Penny turned frantically this way and that. A thin mist lay on the tarmac of the sprawling, tree-bordered car park; the headlights of vehicles on the nearby trunk road blinded her where they went scything by; she couldn’t see Harry anywhere. B
ut Johnny Found could see Penny, and he was right behind her.

  She heard the crunch of gravel on the path leading back to the diner’s door but didn’t dare turn round. Of course, it could be anyone … but it could also be him. She felt rooted to the spot, all of her senses straining to identify what if anything was going on behind her, but utterly incapable of turning round and using the most obvious sense of all. And: God! she prayed. Please let it not be him!

  But it was.

  “Penny?” he said, sly and yet somehow wonderingly.

  Now she turned, but with a sort of slow-motion jerkiness, like a puppet controlled by a spastic puppeteer. And there he was, bearing down on her, wearing a painted-on smile under eyes that were jet-black and flint-hard.

  Her heart very nearly stopped; she wanted to cry out but could only choke; she almost fainted into his arms. He caught her up, looked quickly all around and saw no one. And: “Mine!” he gurgled, glaring into her half-glazed, sideways-sliding eyes behind their fluttering lids. “All Johnny’s now, Penny!”

  He wanted to ask her questions, right now, right here, but knew she wouldn’t hear them. She was sliding away from him—away from the horror of him—into another world. Escaping into unconsciousness. That was a laugh. Why, no way she could escape from Johnny! Not even into death!

  Here, in front of the diner, was the car park; behind it was the lorry park, and dividing the two a belt of trees with paths between. Johnny picked Penny up, hurried with her into the cover of the trees, carried her through them light as a child. Behind him the E-Branch agent and a Special Branch Detective Inspector erupted from the diner, glanced this way and that, saw him hurrying into darkness.

  They came running after him—and the Necroscope came loping after them.

  Harry had heard her cry out. Not aloud, for she’d been too terrified to make any sound whatsoever. He’d heard her in his mind. She was his thrall, and she’d called to him. The call had come just as he was leaving the disabled police car, and at first he hadn’t known what it was. But the vampire in him had known. He had seen Found carrying Penny into the screening trees, towards the lorry park, and he’d seen the two men from the diner running after him. All of them were moving quickly, but not as quick as Harry.

  His lope was more wolf—more alien—than human, and he covered ground like the shadow of a fast-fleeting cloud under the moon. But as he entered the trees on a diagonal course calculated to intercept Johnny Found and his captive, he knew he’d made a mistake. The trees and the shrubs beneath them were an ornamental screen designed to separate the two car parks, and as such they were protected by high wire-mesh fences. Precious seconds were lost as Harry came up against a fence, cursed, and conjured a Möbius door. In another moment he cleared the belt of trees and emerged on the perimeter of the hardstanding …

  … Where a reeling, gagging figure collided with him and brought him to a halt! It was the esper. He knew Harry at once—sensed the awesome power of his metaphysical mind, that and the vampire in him—and threw up a hand to ward him off. The hand was bloody as the gaping wound in his cheek, where Johnny Found had torn a third of his face away.

  Harry held him upright, snarled at him, then thrust him towards one of the paths through the trees. “Go and get help, quickly, before you bleed to death!”

  And as the esper choked out something inarticulate and staggered away, the Necroscope reached out with his vampire awareness to cover the entire park. He found three people at once: Penny, unconscious; Johnny Found, furious and bloody; and the policeman, dead where Found’s weapon had crashed through his ear to gouge into his brain.

  Harry pinpointed their location, conjured a door, and ran through it … and out again at the rear of the Frigis Express truck, where even now Johnny was slamming home the bolt on the roller door. At his feet, the policeman lay crumpled in a pool of his own blood, the left side of his face a raw red pulp.

  The necromancer had taken the policeman’s gun; he sensed Harry’s presence, whirled, aimed, and fired! Harry was coming head-on; he felt a colossal blow as the bullet smashed into his collarbone on the right side, spun him round, and hurled him down on the tarmac.

  Then, startled by the explosion and the flash, Johnny was fumbling the gun and dropping it. Stumbling across Harry, he kicked at him where he lay curled up in his pain; and running past the trailer towards his truck’s cab, the madman raved, cursed, and laughed all in one.

  The pain in Harry’s shoulder was a living thing that took hold of his flesh with white-hot pincers and twisted it, causing him to moan his agony. And he thought: Bastard thing in my blood, my mind! Your fault, you berserk, headlong idiot! Very well, you’ve caused me to be hurt—now heal me!

  Found was in his cab, starting up and revving the engine. Air brakes hissed and the reversing lights blazed crimson to match Harry’s eyes or the jelly coagulating on the side of the dead policeman’s head. Racked by pain, the Necroscope saw the huge bulk of the truck jerk, shudder, and start backing up; in another moment a pair of its twinned wheels skidded viciously, then gripped and dragged the policeman’s body under. Blood and guts gushed as the wheels lifted up barely an inch and the weight of the truck crushed the corpse like toothpaste from a tube.

  He’s lucky he’s dead! Harry dazedly, unthinkingly thought. It’s something he wouldn’t want to happen while he was still alive! They were instinctive thoughts, shocked out of him by the squelching eruption of brains and shit and flailing guts, but they were also deadspeak and the policeman heard him.

  Exhaust gases belched in Harry’s face where he rolled desperately from the path of the reversing truck; the scarlet-dripping wheels missed him by inches; but through all the roar and the stink and the mess on the tarmac he heard and was riveted by the policeman’s answer:

  But I did feel it! And God, it was like dying twice! And Harry’s blood—even his blood—froze as he remembered who was driving the truck: Johnny Found, necromancer, whose actions his victims could feel even as the teeming dead had once felt Dragosani’s!

  Then the air brakes hissed again and the truck jerked to a halt, shuddered, started forward, turned, and rumbled away towards the exit. Johnny Found was making his escape, with Penny aboard. But:

  No, you fucking don’t! Harry fixed the truck’s location in his mind, got to his knees, toppled through a Möbius door and out again into the refrigerated trailer. It was dark in there but that was nothing to the Necroscope. He saw Penny, crawled to her, put his left hand under her head, and drew it into his lap. She opened her eyes and looked into his where they blazed.

  “Harry, I … I didn’t stay in the diner,” she whispered.

  “I know,” he growled. “Did he hurt you?”

  “No.” She shook her head, but weakly. “I … I think I just fainted.”

  Harry had no time to waste. Not now, for his blood was up. Literally! “Cling to me,” he said.

  She did as she was told and Harry let the Möbius equations roll across the computer screen of his mind. One moment later and Penny felt the awesome immensity of the Möbius Continuum, and in the next gravity returned where they fell prone onto Harry’s bed in the house outside Bonnyrig. “This time stay here!” he told her. And before she could even sit up he was gone again …

  In the operations room at E-Branch HQ, Millicent Cleary and the Minister Responsible sat with David Chung, who was also the Duty Officer, at one end of a large desk. The desk was equipped with a radio receiver, a radio telephone, standard telephones, blown-up ordnance survey maps of England under illuminated plastic, and a tray containing various small items of property belonging to Branch agents in the field. Spotlights in the ceiling were concentrated on the desk, turning it and its immediate surroundings into an island of light in the large room’s comparative darkness.

  Millicent Cleary had just a moment ago received a brief telepathic message from Paxton at the house near Bonnyrig, stating that the assault team was in position. Keogh and the girl had been back briefly, but Paxton was sure
that the Necroscope was no longer in the house. Similarly, Frank Robinson, the spotter who was Paxton’s partner on the job, believed one of the two was still there; since there was no noticeable disturbance of the psychic “ether,” he would guess it was the girl. Keogh must have used the Möbius Continuum to drop her off at the house before moving on. If there’d been any indication that the Necroscope himself was still in there, then the team would have maintained ESP silence. But since he wasn’t … Paxton was eager to learn what was happening.

  Cleary passed the mind-message on and the Minister Responsible gave a snort. “I’ve come to the conclusion that you’re right about Paxton,” he said. “All of you. I get the feeling he won’t be satisfied until he’s running the world!”

  Cleary frowned however prettily, and nodded. “Ruining it, you mean!” she said sourly; then quickly added, “Er … sir! But we are right, and you don’t have to be psychic to know it. He’s a menace. We’re lucky Ben Trask is up there keeping an eye on him. Do you want me to tell him anything?”

  The Minister looked at her—also at Chung where he busied himself touching and concentrating on his many contact sigils in their tray, fathoming the whereabouts, mood, and feelings of the agents in the field—and mentally reviewed the situation:

  The telepath Trevor Jordan (who by all rights and natural laws should be a small heap of ashes in a vase) was on a night train heading for London via Darlington. Two E-Branch agents were on the same train and didn’t anticipate too much trouble, even though it was a pretty safe bet that Jordan was a vampire. They were equipped with powerful automatic weapons, and one of them had a small but deadly crossbow. Another man was on his way to the mainline station in Darlington to give them a hand. He had a car, and in its boot a flamethrower.