Necroscope V: Deadspawn n-5

by Brian Lumley

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Trask nodded in the dark. ‘Just looking at it, I can see it’s not right. What about the girl?’

  ‘An hour ago she was here, definitely,’ the other answered. ‘Her thoughts were clouded — mind-smog, yes — but readable to a degree. She’s in thrall to him, no doubt about it. I thought Keogh was here, too — in fact I was sure he was, briefly — but now…’ He shrugged. ‘Telepathy with vampires is a very tricky business. To see without being seen, and to hear without being heard.’

  Before Trask could answer him or make further comment, a tiny red light began to flash on his pocket walkie-talkie. He extended the aerial and depressed the incoming-call button. There sounded the customary wash of background static, and then the quiet, faintly tinny voice of Guy Teale, saying: ‘Car here. How do you read me?’

  ‘OK,’ Trask answered him, soft and low. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘We’ve had a call from HQ,’ Teale came back. ‘We’re to move to final strike locations now, situate ourselves, from there on in maintain radio and ESP silence, and wait for the word.’

  Trask frowned and said: ‘We can ready ourselves, sure, but how will we be able to strike if our target isn’t here? Ask HQ that, will you?’

  Without pause Teale came back: ‘HQ says that in the event there’s no one in the house when they give the word, we remain in situ, stay alert and wait to see what happens.’

  Trask’s frown deepened. ‘Ask them to repeat that, will you? With some of the blanks filled in?’

  ‘I already did.’ Teale’s sigh was clearly audible. ‘Before I even called you. As far as HQ knows, Keogh has the Sanderson girl with him, and he and she are on to the serial killer. Likewise we have people on Keogh and Found — within limits, that is — and also people on Trevor Jordan, on a night train bound for London. So, we’ll let Keogh and/or the police settle with Found, then move on the Necroscope, the girl, and Jordan simultaneously, wherever they are at that time.’

  Trask nodded. ‘So if our people don’t get Harry at their end — and if he escapes back here — we’ll be waiting for him, right?’

  ‘That’s how I see it,’ Teale answered.

  Trask nodded. ‘OK, secure the car and come on in on foot. Meet us at the old bridge, ready to cross in… ten minutes’ time. Then we’ll reorganize, split into two pairs and choose vantage points at the front and rear of the house. That’s all for now. Be seeing you.’

  He pressed the off button.

  Paxton, nervously scanning all about in the darkness under the trees, said, ‘Do you think Teale and Robinson will be OK working together? I mean, I’m sure we’ll be fine together, but they don’t strike me as having a hell of a lot of candlepower between them!’

  ‘You’re probably right.’ Trask stared hard at him in the dark of the night, disliking everything that he saw and felt; especially the fact that every now and then he’d feel Paxton’s talent tugging on the covers of his mind and trying to turn them back. ‘So I’ll team up with Teale, and you can take Robinson.’

  Paxton turned more fully towards him and his eyes were slightly feral in fleeting moonlight. ‘You don’t want us to work together?’

  ‘Paxton, let me put you right,’ Trask told him. ‘The only reason I wanted to work with you up here in the first place was to keep an eye on you. See, I think you’re full of it, and it’s leaking on your attitude. So you’re right, I don’t want us to work together. In fact, I’d rather work with raw shit!’

  Paxton scowled and started to turn away, make tracks back up to the road. But Trask caught him by the arm and turned him around. ‘Oh, and there’s one other thing, Mr Hugely Talented Telepath. I’ve about ninety per cent had it with you trying to read my mind. When I’m a hundred per cent pissed you’ll be the first to know it. Because after that Harry Keogh won’t be the only one who ever tossed you in a river, right?’

  Paxton was wise enough to say nothing. They returned to the road in silence, made their way to the old stone bridge over the river, and waited for Teale and Robinson to join them there…

  Harry and Penny had finished their first coffees half an hour ago. Now they had seconds, which were going cold in their cups. Penny had tried a cream cake, too, from which she’d taken just one bite. She wasn’t sure if it was the cake or her mood, but since nothing tasted right it was probably her mood. Every so often the Necroscope would reach into his inside pocket and take Johnny’s hideous steel-tube weapon into the palm of his hand. Penny was aware each time he did it — aware that he was touching the instrument of her once-death — and she shuddered every time.

  Finally, as Harry reached into his pocket yet again, she burst out: ‘What if he doesn’t stop? What if he drives clear down to London?’

  Harry shrugged. ‘If it looks like he will, then I’ll let him get as… far… as…’ He came to a jerky halt as his fingers touched the awful knife, and briefly closed his eyes behind their dark lenses. When he opened them again his voice had turned cold and taken on a cutting edge. ‘But it won’t come to that. He has stopped, now!’

  ‘Do you know where?’ She clutched his hand.

  He shook his head. ‘No. The only way to find out is to go there and see.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ she whispered. ‘I’m going to see the man who murdered me!’

  ‘More importantly,’ Harry told her, ‘he’s going to see you. And he’s going to wonder about you. If he reads the newspapers he’ll know that Penny, one of the girls he killed, had a look-alike called, by some peculiar coincidence, Penny! But he’ll have a hard time believing he’s actually happened across her. I mean, there are coincidences and coincidences. If he has any brain at all, he’ll find it a damned suspicious thing. It will worry him. That’s what I want to do: worry him. I think Johnny deserves something of a harrowing time before we even-up the score more permanently.’

  ‘We?’ she repeated him. ‘It… it feels like you’re using me, Harry.’

  ‘I suppose I am,’ he answered her, allowing her to lead him out of the cafeteria into the night. ‘Though not as hard as he did.’ He quickly went on: ‘And don’t tell me that’s not fair. Fair is like beauty, it lies in the eyes of the beholder. Also, I’m not asking you to do much, just to be there. There’s someone else with a much larger part to play.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ she said, as he folded her in his arms, conjured a door and carried her over the threshold into the Möbius Continuum. About what’s fair and what’s beautiful, I mean. And it’s a fact, I don’t think there was anything of beauty in Johnny.

  No, Harry answered, grimly, and nothing fair about him, either. But me, I’m fair. I only take an eye for an eye…

  7 Nightmare Junction

  Johnny had stopped at an all-services motorway watering-hole north of Newark. He’d chosen the A1(T) rather than the larger Ml because its service stations usually had richer pickings: not only long-distance truckers and motorists used its facilities but locals, too. It was Johnny’s experience that when the town and village dance halls slowed down around midnight the young ones headed this way for a cheap motorway meal after a hard night’s drinking, dancing and whatever. He’d stopped here before, but no luck as yet. Maybe tonight.

  On clutch and airbrakes, he’d snorted and whoofed the big articulated truck around the tarmac until he’d found a place to park it where its nose sniffed the exit route. It was as well to be able to drive out of such places with as little trouble as possible. The place was on a major junction; the car park was busy and the lorry park half-empty; people came and went in small parties to and from the brightly-lit diner. Johnny’s would be just one more face over a plate of chicken and chips and a pint of alcohol-free.

  Inside, there’d been nothing much of a queue at the self-service bar; in a little while Johnny had settled at a table in a corner booth where he’d toyed with his food and casually looked the place over for a likely female face. There were several, but… they didn’t fit his bill: too old, too drab, slack-faced, sharp-eyed, accompanied, or
stone-cold sober. A few bright-eyed young things, yes, but all hanging on to flash boyfriends. Well, that’s how it went. But there were plenty more places just like this between here and London. And you never could tell when your luck was going to change.

  He remembered a time when, on a lonely stretch of road, this bird had roared by in a little red sports job. He’d bombed after her and forced her off the road into a ditch, then told her he was sorry and it was an accident — but he would be glad to give her a lift to the nearest I garage. Oh, he’d given her a lift, all right, but not to a garage. And then it had been her turn to give him a lift, a really good one, a real high. Johnny had been in a weird mood that night: after killing her he’d chopped a channel up under her jaw and fucked her in the throat. She’d felt it, of course, and how the dead bitch had yelped! Oh, she’d had cock in her throat before, but not coming from that direction.

  Thinking about it had got him worked up. He must have one tonight. But not from this place. Maybe he should move on.

  And that was when he saw… he saw… what the shit?

  It wasn’t possible but… he had to fight with his eyes to keep them from looking in her direction again. She was just over there; she’d just slid her backside on to a seat in a booth close by; there was a blind guy there, too — or a guy in dark glasses, anyway — but he didn’t seem to be with her. She had a coffee, just a coffee, and she was the same as last time. She was exactly the same. And for a moment Johnny’s mind whirled, for he could swear he’d had this one before!

  How can that be? he asked himself. How can it be? And the answer was simple: it couldn’t be. Unless this girl was the other’s twin sister… or her double.’

  And then he remembered reading something about that in the papers: how they thought the one he’d had in Edinburgh — Penny, that was her name — was someone else. But then she’d turned up alive: the spitting image of the one he’d screwed, murdered, and screwed again. Stranger still, the one who’d turned up had also been called Penny. Coincidence? Jesus, coincidence! But the biggest coincidence of them all: here she was, right now, right here. That is, unless he’d started seeing fucking things.

  Slowly Johnny looked up from his food, through the acid-etched, fern-patterned glass dividers which loaned the booths a little privacy, until her face was directly in his line of vision. Maybe for a moment he caught her eye, but just for a moment, and then she looked away. The half-blind guy — the guy with the eye problem, anyway, who shared her booth — had his back to Johnny; but he didn’t look much anyway, slumped over his mug of coffee like that. Her father, maybe?

  No, her lover, Harry Keogh answered, but silently, speaking only to himself. Her vampire lover, you scumbag.

  He had been into Pound’s mind from the moment he and Penny had entered the place, and the mental cesspool in there was as rank as anything he’d ever come up against. Together with the necromancer’s recognition of Penny as a former victim, or that victim’s double, it strengthened Harry’s resolve, confirmed his commitment. But as yet Pound’s recognition of her hadn’t produced the reaction Harry had expected. Curiosity, yes, but not fear. In a way, perhaps that was understandable.

  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 shortlived 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 toward 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. OK?’

  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 on 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 meant 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 Pound’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 OK?’

  ‘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 OK.’ But she avoided looking Pound’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 wraithlike between the cars ranked like soldiers on the hard-standing. His Wamphyri senses guiding him, he went straight to the unmarked police car and approached it from the rear. There was a driver, a plain-clothes 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 front passenger seat.

  He was out like a light — or 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 Pound’s steel-tube knife and drove it into the wall of a tyre until it hissed air and sagged down on to 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 back seat, 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 crossbows. 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 tyre 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, cancelling her former resolve to ‘be OK’. 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 OK, 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 colour 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.