by Brian Lumley
. . . He was also aware that it could be a case of “what came first, the chicken or the egg?” Had Janet Symonds’ disappearance initiated Miller’s search for evidence of its cause, historical facts which he might use to clear his name? Or had he possessed previous knowledge of the earlier cases, knowledge that perhaps affected the balance of his mind, causing him to perpetuate the horror? Or there again, could it be that he’d succumbed to some strange emanation from the forest, such as the weird psychic—and peculiarly sirenlike—whispers that had so disturbed the Necroscope?
Harry looked at the faded, brittle cuttings once again and had to smile, however wryly. Greg Miller may not be a murderer, but he was certainly a petty thief! The newspaper cuttings were all overstamped with the archival crest of the Sunderland Times and the constraint: “Not to be removed from these premises!”
It seemed Miller had been quite thorough in his search for evidence, until now—having gone as far as he could in museums and such, and convinced of his own sanity—he had begun searching for the actual villain of the piece in the gloomy verges of Hazeldene; a task in which it was more than possible the Necroscope could assist him.
Having determined to do precisely that—and perhaps simultaneously solve that other facet of this mystery—Harry would now return to Harden; except he wasn’t sure how best to explain his business here to the curator, as promised, and as always he would avoid telling lies wherever possible. There was of course a way around that problem, but as for what the old fellow would think when he came to let Harry out of the locked room, only to discover that he was already out and the door still locked . . . !
Well, since it seemed unlikely that the old man would ever meet up with “John Smith” again, the Necroscope could only hope that maybe he, too, enjoyed the occasional mystery. . . .
When Harry emerged cautiously from the Möbius Continuum behind a bush in Jimmy Collins’ garden, it somehow felt as if the time should be moving on towards evening; as if he’d spent the entire day in that dusty old museum room instead of less than an hour. Shrugging the feeling off as the summer sunshine warmed him, he put the sensation down to a combination of his relatively brief exposure to the museum’s intrinsic gloom and, despite its total absence of time, the Möbius Continuum’s utter, even primal darkness.
Entering the house, he brewed a pot of tea, took a cup into the garden, sat in one of the two deck chairs, and used the other chair as a table to support his cup and saucer. Then, trying to relax—for he felt unaccustomedly nervous—and slowly sipping his tea, he gradually settled into an uneasy reverie as his metaphysical mind took over and allowed the background “static” of dead voices to wash in upon him.
These were not in the main human voices, though the echoes of a few frightened souls—people who were only recently dead and couldn’t as yet understand what had happened to them—were there on the periphery of the Necroscope’s awareness. No, these were the revenant reflections of other than people: such as the massacred ants in their crazy-paving mausoleum, or the cocooned flies under the terra-cotta wall tiles, or even the frog spawn in a nearby ditch, where a pitiless sun had steamed away its jelly and myriad unhatched tadpole siblings to a gradually stiffening paste. These things—
—And then, suddenly, something else!
This time, because he had experienced it before and knew where to concentrate his mind, Harry tuned in on it instantly, almost by accident and before he was ready to receive it: that eerie sighing, those massed pleading cries from a place beyond life! No longer the psychic susurrations, the “white noise” of exanimate semi-sentients—but most certainly the pitiful telepathic petitions of human revenants trapped in a nightmare and unable to awaken or escape—the voices were, as before, even fainter than those of phantom insects; but they were the deadspeak cries of people! And whatever it was that the Necroscope had happened upon, he was now more determined than ever to put an end to it.
Yesterday (oh really? But it felt more like a week!) Harry had thought he might track down the source of the emanations by use of a system of triangulation: by taking a number of psychic readings from various locations around the forest and pinpointing the spot where they crossed. He’d been distracted from this plan first when he came across Forester and Miller scuffling in the derelict farmyard, next when the phantom voices had either shut down of their own accord or had been . . . but what, cloaked against their will? If the latter, it seemed possible that whatever power or agency had suppressed them had done so because it sensed the Necroscope’s presence. And now Harry remembered Greg Miller’s reply when he asked him what was going on:
“Don’t ask, because you just wouldn’t understand,” the man had said. “You have to be able to feel it, to have known it, to understand it.”
Well, Harry had felt something—indeed, he was feeling it even now, as it dawned on him that “it” might be feeling him!—so that he at once erected his mental shields to secure himself from telepathic probing. But too late!
He felt a sudden shock, a convulsion in the psychic aether—as if something had suddenly started awake—and in that same moment the dead whispers were shut off as surely as if a switch had been thrown!
Harry jerked in his deck chair, spilled his tea in his lap, and shot to his feet. Standing there in the enclosed garden, he stared west in the direction of the forest, glaring at the high garden wall as if trying to burn a window through it, picturing in his mind’s eye the near-distant, gloomy, brooding expanse of Hazeldene. And despite that the day was still and he could feel the sun warm on his shoulders, he also felt that a chill breeze had sought him out, found him, and blown upon his soul.
Moments later, as he calmed down and used the flats of his hands to squeegee warm liquid from the fronts of his trousers, the Necroscope tried however cautiously to locate the phantom voices again—to no avail. Apart from the “usual” background static or white noise, he could detect nothing whatsoever; indeed, it felt as if the psychic atmosphere itself was dead.
And despite that Harry, as wary as he was, remained eager to regain contact—and for all that he continued to focus his mind, to concentrate, as the shadows grew longer in the garden—that was how things would stay for the rest of a frustrating, mentally wearying afternoon.
But only a little while earlier on that same afternoon . . .
As so often before during this long, hot summer, the old Thing in the forest had sensed the presence of the lovers, this time less than a quarter mile away. And as always it had vented its most powerfully seductive pheromones in the hope that something of them would drift in the right direction.
Those pheromones were the lure, the sickly sweet but irresistible honeysuckle “scent” that excited the lovers and, after they made love, caused them to sleep; and slowly but surely the lure was working. Five or six weeks ago at the beginning of the hot weather, the lovers had used to sate themselves in a favourite, secret trysting-place almost a mile away: a shady spot beneath the spreading branches of a tree at the rim of the woods, by a field lying fallow with lush grasses. And when the ancient Thing had realized how frequently the pair pleasured each other in that place, then it had determined to undertake a long, slow trek in that direction, while at the same time using its exotic musk to lure them towards itself. For it was the ancient Thing’s resolve, its intention, that in this way it would meet with the lovers at some juncture . . . a fatal “tryst” for at least one of the pair, whose juices should be all the nutrition necessary to facilitate the release of the Thing’s spores, alive and vibrant as the quality of the salty-sweet sustenance itself.
But for now . . .
. . . The Thing had sensed the lovers there in the afternoon, felt their nearness and seen how they’d moved that much closer, how its aphrodisiac pheromones were luring them day by day more surely towards their doom. And the old Thing was pleased—or it would be except . . .
. . . The being known to the Thing as the Searcher was there, too. But of course he was: he always was! The bi
tter reek of an enemy’s essence, the Searcher’s plasma, was unmistakable; likewise the mental bile—the mordant flux of tangible, implacable loathing—which he felt for the ancient Thing. And day by day, he too drew menacingly closer. But after all, what could he do? How might the Searcher ever hope to locate an ancient Thing who could disappear into the sprawling bramble thickets whenever he got too close? Oh, he was a strange one for a fact: a different one who seemed to sense the old Thing’s presence as no other of his species ever had. But then, the old Thing had taken the one he loved. That must be it: revenge! But never so strong, not in all the Thing’s millennia of existence and experience.
Which was the closest it would ever come to an understanding of the nature of human love. . . .
But while love remained a mystery, the old Thing did understand determination: the same concentrated effort of will that so pervaded the Searcher, and which the ancient Thing itself expended to entice its victims. It understood it and even now, or especially now—in the still of the forest, where beams of sunlight filtered down to dapple the leaves with gold—could even feel it reaching to enfold, to explore . . . and to know?
But feel it? Determined curiosity?
The ancient Thing could feel it, yes—the intrusion of an outside influence!
An outsider, not the Searcher but some other—someone or some-thing else—something far stranger, far stronger. A rare force: a creature that listened, heard, was drawn to the voices of those gone before who now formed a part, albeit an unwilling and metaphysical part, of the ancient Thing. A unique mind that fastened like a leech to those whispering voices and heard them not as the grotesque “singing” or “chorus” which so entertained the old Thing, but as cries of protest, outrage, and horror from a place beyond life, from within the Thing’s very mind. Unique, yes, this being—
—This intelligence that spoke to the dead!
As that alarming truth dawned so the ancient Thing lowered mental barriers over the voices that betrayed it to the strange new Power, stifling them however temporarily. And then, closing its mind to the outside world—concealing as best possible its psychic aura—it ceased its laborious locomotion and became as still as its sudden trembling would allow. . . .
At about 7:00 P.M., with the shadow of the house falling square on the garden, Jimmy Collins returned home from a day’s work to find Harry still out there.
Sunken-eyed from his hour-long sessions of mental concentration separated by only brief periods of rest, the Necroscope seemed worn out. And because he’d spent most of the time facing west, his face was rough and reddened from an unaccustomed overdose of ultraviolet radiation. So that Jimmy’s first words when he saw how exhausted Harry looked, were: “Hey, Harry—are you okay? I mean, you look completely knackered!”
Waving his friend’s concern aside, the Necroscope replied, “I . . . I’m okay, yes. I went and fell asleep again, that’s all. After you warned me about that, too!” Then, standing and allowing his shoulders to slump a little, he headed wearily indoors.
Jimmy was hot on his heels, and as Harry collapsed into a kitchen chair he said, “Look, let me fix you a coffee before I go and freshen up. I’m dry as a stick after working in a dusty attic all day. I was hoping maybe we could get down to the pub again. I mean, couldn’t you just kill a pint?”
At which the Necroscope realised how dry he was, and also how careless; to have let himself become so totally dehydrated! “Well?” Jimmy pressed him. “What do you say? The first round is on me.”
“I think we should both freshen up,” said Harry. “So let’s skip the coffee and get on with it—and the second round is on me!”
The pub was one of Harden’s oldest buildings; with its bull’s-eye pane windows, an open hearth, low ceilings, and smoke-blackened, exposed oak beams, it was very atmospheric. The haunt of old-timers, retired miners whose bowlegged gait and coal-dust-ingrained faces spoke however ineloquently of their many years of hard work in the pits, the pub’s wooden chairs, green baize card tables, and tobacco-scented air seemed especially welcoming to the Necroscope and his friend after the disparate trials of a mutually taxing day.
As they crossed the floor to the bar, Harry found himself drawn to peer into a shadowy corner beyond a small table where a wooden bench backed up against the wall. For a single moment a face returned his gaze, then quickly drew back out of sight; but not before the Necroscope recognized Constable Jack Forester. And he thought to himself: How fortunate! Because there’s something I’d like to ask you, Jack. So while Jimmy ordered the drinks he crossed to Forester’s corner.
“Hello again and good evening,” he said, as he approached. And before the other could reply: “I’m glad I spotted you there in the corner. It will save me a trip down to the police post.”
“Oh?” said Forester, his voice a little slurred. “And why, may I ask, would you be calling in down at the shop, Mr. Keogh? Or ish it—er, is it—perhaps, that you want to report something?”
Harry started to nod, changed his mind and shook his head, and finally said: “Well, yes and no—or maybe both: something to ask, and also something to tell.” He drew up a chair and sat down.
“Something to ask?” said Forester, cocking his head on one side. “An enquiry? In respect of? But before you tell me, don’t you think you might have asked if you could join me before sitting down? After all, it could be that I’m waiting for someone. And since I’m not in uniform surely I desherve—I deserve—my privashy, a little time to myshelf?”
“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” Harry replied, “but I find myself involved in something strange, and I think—”
“—And I think,” the other cut him off, breathing alcohol fumes at him, “that what you’re talking about, what you want to know about, and what you want to tell me, has to do with me and Greg Miller, right? I mean, it’s fairly obvious that you talked to him the other day, and it’s likely he told you a lot of lies and a bloody crazy story. Frankly, I think you’ve got a lot of nerve, Mr. Harry Keogh, coming in here annoying me on one of my rare evenings off!”
Attempting to stand up, Forester half-made it to his feet, staggered and sat down again. His forearms, in thumping down on the small table, caused a cluster of empty glasses—a one-pint glass and three shots—to jump and clatter, while a full pint glass slopped a little beer. Avoiding the splash, Harry jerked his chair back from the table. There had been enough accidents with liquid for one day.
“Damn!” said Forester, looking stupid, just as Jimmy Collins arrived with a pint beer glass in each hand.
“Er . . .” Jimmy mumbled, glancing from Harry to Forester and back again. “I mean . . . am I interrupting something?”
“Just give us a minute or two,” said Harry, accepting his beer. “The constable is advising me about something. When he’s done I’ll be right with you.”
Looking mystified, Jimmy shrugged and moved away, back to the bar. And Forester said, “I’m what? Advising you about something? Huh! I don’t recall shaying I’d—”
“—Just an excuse,” said Harry, cutting him off. “But if I can be frank too, it seems to me you’re still punishing yourself over something: probably over the Symonds girl? How first you lost her to Greg Miller, and then how both of you . . . well, lost her?” He drank a mouthful of beer before continuing: “Oh, and by the way, I don’t think you’re a hundred percent sure he killed her. No, not by any means.”
Propping himself in the corner and seeming to shrink down a little, Forester was silent for long seconds, then said, “If I was shober, I believe I’d give you another chance to dishplay your martial arts skills. And if I could get just one good shot at your nose, maybe it’d teach you to be jusht a bit more careful where you’re sticking it in future!”
“Listen,” said the Necroscope, undeterred. “I’ve seen some of Greg Miller’s evidence that suggests he may not be as mad or as bad as you think he is—or was. For instance: did you know that during World War II, there were—”
“—Several cases of people, including young girls, going missing in and around Harden and Hazeldene?” Forester was starting to sober up. Sitting up straighter he slid his almost full glass to one side and began using beer mats to soak up some of the spillage. “You see, Harry,” he continued, “this is all old stuff that Miller’s lawyer dug up fifteen years ago.” He shook his head tiredly. “It didn’t convince anybody then and it won’t now.”
“Oh really?” said Harry. “Well, it helped to convince me!”
“Then you’re a fool!” said the other. “And anyway, who the hell are you, digging around in all this . . . this rubbish? Some kind of sensationalist reporter? A columnist for UFO Monthly or something?” Breathing deeply, and shaking his head to clear it, the constable made as if to stand again. Taking a chance, Harry reached across the table and applied pressure to Forester’s arm to keep him off balance and hold him in place if only for a few more moments. The man was an officer of the law, of course, but Harry knew people in London with a great deal more power—not to mention Powers—than any village policeman.
Perhaps at that moment—as he felt the Necroscope’s hand on his arm—suddenly, for the first time, Forester truly recognised Harry’s authority. At any rate he sat still, focussed his eyes more surely on Harry’s face, and said, “Okay, I’ll ask you just one more time: who or what the hell are you?”
“I’ll tell you what I’m not,” said Harry. “I’m not a reporter or columnist for any sensationalist magazine. But I do have connections in very high places, and I am interested in investigating injustices as or when I come across them. And yes, I do believe there has been a great injustice here. But unlike you I know I’m not infallible, and I admit that the story in its entirety eludes me. In fact I still don’t know the half of it, and I’ll be only too willing to listen to any logical argument, any genuine proof of Miller’s guilt that you might care to produce. So, if you’re still keen to knock me down, Jack, you can forget about giving me a bloody nose and simply prove me wrong.”