by Brian Lumley
‘Yes,’ Harry finally answered, ‘I think I do love you. I mean, I know I do. It’s just that I’ve a lot on my mind. Is that what you mean? That I don’t show it enough? See, I don’t know what you want me to say. Or I haven’t the time to think of the right things to say.’
She clung to his arm, snuggled closer as they walked. ‘Oh, you don’t have to say anything. It’s just that I’d hate it to end…’
‘Why should it end?’
‘I don’t know, but I worry about it. We don’t seem to be getting anywhere. My parents worry, too…’
‘Oh,’ he said, glumly nodding. ‘Marriage, you mean?’
‘No, not really,’ she sighed again. ‘I know how you feel about that: not yet, you keep saying. And: we’re too young. I agree with you. I think my mother and father do, too. I know you like to be on your own a lot; and you’re right: we are too young!’
‘You keep saying that,’ he said, ‘but still we end up going round in circles.’
She looked downcast. ‘It’s just that… well, the way you are, I never know what’s what. If only you’d tell me what it is that preoccupies you so. I know there’s something, but you won’t say.’
He looked about to say something, changed his mind. Brenda held her breath, let it go when it became apparent he’d backed off. She tried elimination.
‘I know it’s not your writing, because you were like this long before you started to write. In fact, as long as I’ve known you. If only — ‘
‘Brenda!’ he stopped, grabbed her in his arms, dragged
her to a halt. He seemed breathless, unable to speak, to say what he wanted to say. It frightened her.
‘Yes, Harry? What is it?’
He gulped, drew breath, started to walk again. She caught up with him, grabbed his hand. ‘Harry?’
He wouldn’t look at her, but he said:
‘Brenda, I… I want to talk to you.’
‘But I want you to!’ she said.
Again he stopped walking, drew her into an embrace, stared out to sea over her shoulder. ‘It’s a queer subject, that’s all…’
She took the initiative, broke away, led him by the hand along the beach. ‘Right. We walk, you talk, I listen. Queer subject? I don’t mind. There, I’ve done my bit. Your turn.’
He nodded, glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, coughed to clear his throat and said: ‘Brenda, have you ever wondered what people think about when they’re dead? I mean, what their thoughts are when they lie there in their graves.’
She felt goose-flesh come up on her neck and at the top of her spine. Even with the sun hot on her, the utterly emotionless tone of his voice coupled with what he had said chilled her to the marrow. ‘Have I ever wondered — ?’
‘I said it was a queer subject,’ he hurriedly reminded her.
She didn’t know what to say to him, how to answer him. She gave an involuntary shudder. He couldn’t be serious, could he? Or was this something he was working on? That must be it: it was a story he was writing!
Brenda was disappointed. A story, that’s all. On the other hand, perhaps she had been wrong to neglect his writing as the source of his moodiness. Maybe he was that way because there was no one to talk to. Everyone knew that he was precocious; his writing was brilliant, the work of a mature man. Was that it? Was it simply that he had too much bottled up inside, and no way to let it out?
‘Harry,’ she said, ‘you should have told me it was your writing!’
‘My writing?’ his eyebrows went up.
‘A story,’ she said. That’s what it is, isn’t it?’
He began to shake his head, then changed it to a nod. And smiling, he nodded more rapidly. ‘You guessed it,’ he said. ‘A story. But a weird one. I’m having difficulty pulling it together. If I could talk about it — ‘
‘But you can, to me.’
‘So let’s talk. It might give me some more ideas, or tell me what’s wrong with the ideas I’ve got now.’
They carried on walking, hand in hand. ‘Right,’ she said, and after frowning for a moment, ‘happy thoughts.’
‘Eh?’
‘The dead, in their graves. I think they’d think happy thoughts. That would be the equivalent of heaven, you know.’
‘People who were unhappy in their lives don’t think anything,’ he told her, matter-of-factly. ‘They’re just glad to be out of it, mostly.’
‘Ah! You mean that you’re going to have categories of dead people: they won’t be all the same or think the same thoughts.’
He nodded. ‘That’s right. Why should they? They didn’t think the same thoughts when they were alive, did they? Oh, some of them are happy, with nothing to complain of. But there are others who lie there sick with hatred, because they know the ones who killed them live on, unpunished.’
‘Harry, that’s an awful idea! What sort of story is it, anyway? It has to be a ghost story.’
He licked his lips, nodded again. ‘Something like that, yes. It’s about a man who can talk to people in their graves. He can hear them, in his head, and know what they’re thinking. Yes, and he can talk to them.’
‘I still think it’s terrible,’ she said. ‘I mean, it’s horrible! But the idea is good. And these dead people actually talk to him? But why would they want to?’
‘Because they’re lonely. See, there’s no one else like this man. As far as he knows, he’s the only one who can do it. They don’t have anyone else to talk to.’
‘Wouldn’t that drive him mad? I mean, all those voices in his head at the same time, all yammering for his attention?’
Harry gave a wry smile. ‘It doesn’t happen like that,’ he said. ‘See, normally they just lie there, thinking. The body goes — I mean, you know, it rots — eventually becomes dust. But the mind goes on. Don’t ask me how, that’s something I won’t try to explain. It’s simply that the mind is the conscious and the subconscious control centre of a person, and after he dies it carries on — but only on the subconscious level. Like he’s sleeping; and in fact he is sleeping, in a way. It’s just that he won’t wake up again. So you see, the necroscope only talks to the people he wants to talk to.’
‘Necroscope?’
That’s my name for such a person. A man who looks into the minds of the dead…’
‘I see,’ said Brenda, frowning. ‘At least, I think I do. So happy people just lie there remembering all the good things, or thinking happy thoughts. And unhappy people, they just switch off?’
‘Something like that. Malicious people think bad things, and murderers think murderous thoughts, and so on: their own particular sorts of hell, if you like. But these are the ordinary people, with ordinary thoughts. I mean, their thoughts run on a low level. Let’s say that in life their thoughts were pretty mundane. I’m not putting them down; they just weren’t very bright, that’s all. But there are extraordinary people, too: creative people, great thinkers, architects, mathematicians, authors, the real intellectuals. And what do you suppose they do?’
Brenda looked at him, trying to gauge his thoughts. She paused to pick up a bright, sea-washed pebble. And in a little while: ‘I suppose they’d go on doing their thing,’ she said. ‘If they were, say, great thinkers in their lives, then they’d just go on sort of thinking their special thoughts.’
‘Right!’ said Harry emphatically. ‘That’s exactly what they do. The bridge-builders go on building their bridges — in their heads. Beautiful, airy things that span entire oceans! The musicians write wonderful songs and melodies. The mathematicians develop abstract theories and polish them until they are crystal things even a child could understand, and yet so astonishing that they hold the secrets of the universe. They improve upon what they were doing when they were alive. They carry their ideas to the limits of perfection, finishing all the unfinished thoughts they never had time for when they lived. And no distractions, no outside interference, no one to bother or confuse or concern them.’
‘The way you tell it,’ she said,
‘it sounds nice. But do you think that’s how it really is?’
‘Of course,’ he nodded, and quickly checked himself. ‘In my story, anyway. I mean, how would I know what it’s really like?’
‘I was just being silly,’ she told him. ‘Of course it’s not really like that. Anyway, I still don’t see why these dead people would want to talk to your, er, necroscope. Wouldn’t he be a distraction? Wouldn’t he annoy them, butting in like that on all their great schemes?’
‘No,’ Harry shook his head. ‘On the contrary. It’s human nature, see? What’s the good of doing something wonderful if you can’t tell or show anyone what you’ve done? That’s why they enjoy talking to the necroscope. He can appreciate their genius. He’s the only one who can do that! Also, he’s sympathetic — he wants to know about their wonderful discoveries, the fantastic inventions they’ve designed, which won’t be invented in the real world for a thousand years!’
Brenda suddenly saw something in what he’d said. ‘But that’s a wonderful idea, Harry! It’s not morbid at all, as I first thought. Why, the necroscope could “invent” their inventions for them! He could build their bridges, make their music, write their unwritten masterpieces! Is that what’s going to happen? In your story, I mean?’
He turned his face away, stood gazing far out to sea, and said: ‘Something like that, I suppose. That’s what I haven’t worked out yet…’
Then for a while they were silent, and shortly afterwards they came to Crimdon and stopped for a coffee in a little cafe at the foot of the beach banks.
Harry lay sleeping on his bed, stark naked, the sheets thrown back. It was a very warm evening and the sun, sinking, continued to stream its golden fire in through the high windows of his tiny flat. Seeing the fine sheen of sweat where it made his brow damp, Brenda drew the thin curtains across the garret windows to cut down on the sunlight. As the shadow fell across his face he groaned and mumbled something, but Brenda couldn’t catch what he said. Quietly dressing, she thought back on the day. She thought back to other times, too, allowing her memory full rein as she examined the years she and Harry had known each other. Today had been good. And at last Harry had talked to her about… well, about things. He’d opened up a little and got some of it off his chest and out of his system. And since their long talk about his story he’d been a lot easier in himself, happy almost. Just what it would take to make him truly happy — Brenda could hardly imagine the nature of such a thing. He said it was that he had ‘a lot on his mind’. A lot of what? His writing? Possibly. But she had never known him to be truly happy. Or if he had been it hadn’t shown much…
But there, she’d side-tracked herself. She went back to today.
After Crimdon they’d walked on for another mile to a more or less deserted part of the beach where they’d gone swimming in their underwear. From a distance no one would be able to tell; it would be thought they wore costumes. After a little while, as they fooled about in the water, some old beachcombing tramp had come on the scene and it had been time to go. Dressing before the old boy could get really close, they’d dried out as they covered the last leg of their walk. In Hartlepool, a bus ride from the old part of the town to the ‘new’ had carried them almost to the door of the three-storey Victorian house where Harry had his garret flat, and there Brenda had made sandwiches for them before they’d showered and made love. The sex they’d shared had been delicious, with both of them still tasting a little of the sea’s salt, all glowing from the sun and radiating their heat, and all seeming very right and natural. She liked Harry best in the summer, for then he wasn’t so pale and his thin frame seemed somehow more muscular.
Not that he was in any way weak or weedy; Harry was well able to look after himself and hardly the type to accept sand kicked in his face. Twice Brenda had seen him deal with wouldbe bullies, and they had been the ones to go away nursing cuts and bruises. She secretly prided herself that on both occasions she had been the spur to his anger. Harry was indifferent towards jibes aimed at himself — he could always ignore them, put them down to the ignorance of louts-but he would not accept insults or insinuations directed at Brenda, or at himself when she was with him. At times like that he seemed almost to become another person, a harder, faster, more capable person entirely. And yet even his mastery of self-defence mystified her; it was just another of those things in which he had grown inexplicably expert. Like his lovemaking, and his writing. Brenda looked at them in that order:
Harry had been sixteen when he first made love to her when they first did it properly, anyway — but he’d been eager for it long before that. And as she had pointed out on the beach, he had very quickly got to be very good at it. Innocent in all such things, Brenda had thought there was only one way to do it, but Harry’s sexual repertoire had seemed inexhaustible. And it was perfectly true: she had often wondered if someone else had shown him how.
In the end she’d stopped worrying about it, putting it down to the fact that he was precocious. For some unexplained reason there were skills in which Harry Keogh excelled — in which he excelled naturally, without any prior knowledge or intensive instruction. His writing:
Harry had once admitted that his English had used to let him down badly; it had very nearly stopped him going on to the Tech. to complete his schooling, when he’d completely messed up the English examination paper.
Well, however much that had been the case then, it certainly wasn’t so now. Perhaps it was that he’d worked hard at it, but when? Brenda had never seen him studying or swotting-up his English; he had never seemed to study I anything much. And yet here he was, eighteen years old and an author, and so prolific that he was published under four pseudonyms! Only short stories so far, but three a week at least — and all of them snapped up — and she knew that he was now working on a novel.
His battered, second-hand typewriter stood on a small table close to the window. Once when she’d dropped in to see him unexpectedly, Harry had been working. It was one of the few occasions when Brenda had actually seen him at work. Coming upstairs, she had heard the intermittent clatter of the keys of his machine, and creeping into his tiny entrance hall she’d poked her head round the door. Lost in thought, smiling to himself — even muttering to himself, she’d fancied — Harry’s chin had been propped in his hands where he sat at the table. Then he had straightened up to tap out a few more two-fingered lines, only pausing to nod and smile at some private thought, and gaze out of the garret window and across the road.
Then she had knocked on the door, startling him, and entered the room; Harry had greeted her, put away his work and that had been that — except that she had glanced at the sheet of paper in the typewriter and had seen typed at its head: Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Rake.
It was only later that she’d wondered what Harry could possibly know about the seventeenth century (what, Harry? with his limited knowledge of history, which as it happened had always been his very worst subject?) or, for that matter, rakes…
She was all done with dressing now and tiptoed across the room to apply a little make-up to her face in front of a wall mirror. This took her close to his table, and again she glanced at the typewriter and the uncompleted sheet it contained. Obviously he was still hard at his novel: the A4 sheet was numbered P.213 and in the left-hand upper corner bore the legend Diary of… etc.
Brenda wound the sheet up a little and read what written — or at least started to. Then, blushing, she averted her eyes, stared out the window. It was hot stuff: very polished, very stylish, extremely randy! Out of the corner of her eye she glanced at the sheet again. She loved seventeenth-century romances and Harry’s style was perfect — but this wasn’t a romance and his material was frankly pornographic.
Only then did she notice what she was looking at through the window: the old cemetery across the road. The graveyard, four hundred years old, with its great horse-chestnuts, glossy shrubbery and flower borders, its leaning, weathered headstones and generally well-tended pebble plots.
And as she gazed, so she wondered at Harry’s choice of a dwelling-place. There were better flats around, all over town, but he had told her that he liked the view’. And it was only now that she’d realised what the view was. Oh, pretty enough in the summer, certainly, but a graveyard for all that!
Behind her Harry once again mouthed something and turned on his side. She crossed to where he lay and smiled gently down on him, then drew a sheet over his lower half. In the shade now, he was starting to shiver a little. In any case, she would soon have to wake him; it was time she got on her way. Her parents liked her to be in while it was still daylight, on those occasions when they didn’t know where she was. But first she would make some coffee. As she began to turn away Harry spoke yet again, and this time his words were very clear:
‘Don’t worry, Ma. I’m a big boy now. I can take care of myself. You can rest easy…’ He paused and even sleeping seemed to adopt an attitude of listening. Then:
‘No, I’ve told you before, Ma — he didn’t hurt me. Why should he? Anyway, I went to Auntie and Uncle. They looked after me. Now I’m grown up. And very soon now, maybe when you know I’m okay, then you’ll be able to rest easy…’
Another pause, a brief period of listening, and: ‘But why can’t you, Ma?’
Then more incoherent mumbling before ‘… I can’t! Too far away. I know you’re trying to tell me something but… just a whisper, Ma. I hear some of it but… don’t know what… make out what you’re saying. Maybe if I come to see you, come to where you are…’ Harry was restless now and sweating profusely for all that he shivered. Looking at him, Brenda became a little worried. Was it some kind of fever? Sweat gathered in the hollow above the middle of his upper lip; it formed droplets on his forehead and made his hair damp; his hands jerked and twitched beneath the sheet. She reached out a hand and touched him. ‘Harry?’ ‘What! he burst awake, his eyes snapping open and staring fixedly, his entire body going rigid as an iron bar. ‘Who…?’