Necroscope®

by Brian Lumley

  “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 sidetracked 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 beach-combing 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 an
d 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 would-be 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 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 secondhand 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 was 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 realized 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…?”

  “Harry, Harry! It’s only me. You were nightmaring.” Brenda cradled him in her arms and he let her, curling up and throwing his arms about her. “It was about your Mam, Harry. Listen, you’re all right now. Let me go and make some coffee.”

  She hugged him tighter for a moment, then gently released herself and stood up. His eyes, still wide open, followed her as she moved to the alcove where he had his rudimentary kitchen. “About my mother?” he said.

  Spooning instant coffee into mugs, she nodded. She filled the electric kettle and switched it on. “You called her ‘Ma,’ and you were talking to her.”

  He uncurled himself and sat up, brushing his fingers dazedly through his hair. “What did I say?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing much. Mainly mumbo-jumbo. You told her you were grown up now, and that she should rest easy. It was just a nightmare, Harry.”

  By the time the coffee was ready he had dressed himself. They said no more about his nightmare but drank their coffees; then he walked her down to the bus stop for Harden, where they waited in silence until the bus came. At the last, before she boarded, he kissed her lightly on the cheek. “See you soon,” he said.

  “Tomorrow?” Tomorrow was Sunday.

  “No, during the week. I’ll come up for you. ’Bye, love.”

  She got a seat at the back of the bus and watched Harry through the rear window where he stood alone at the stop. As the bus began to round a bend he turned on his heel and walked along t
he pavement away from his flat. Wondering where he was headed, Brenda kept watching him as long as she could. The last she saw of him was when he turned in through the gates of the cemetery, with the sun’s last rays burning in his hair.

  Then the bus was round the bend and Harry was out of sight.

  * * *

  Harry did not come to see her during the week, and Brenda’s work began to suffer at the ladies’ hairdressing salon in Harden. By Thursday she was thoroughly worried about him; on Friday night she cried and her father said she was a fool for him. “That lad’s bloody weird!” he declared. “Our Brenda, you must be soft!” And he wouldn’t hear of her going down to Hartlepool that night. “Not on a Friday night, my girl, when all the lads have their beer money. You can go and see your daft Harry tomorrow!”

  Tomorrow seemed ages coming and Brenda hardly slept at all, but Saturday morning bright and early she took a bus into town and went up to Harry’s flat. She had her own key and let herself in but he wasn’t to be found. In the typewriter was a sheet of paper with yesterday’s date and a simple message:

  Brenda—

  I’ve gone up to Edinburgh for the weekend. I’ve people to see up there. I’ll be back Monday at the latest and I’ll see you then—promise. Sorry I didn’t see you during the week—I had a lot on my mind and wouldn’t have been much fun.

  Love, Harry

  The last two words meant a lot to her and so she forgave him the rest. Anyway, Monday wasn’t so very far away—but who could he possibly have to see in Edinburgh? He had a stepfather up there, who hadn’t once seen him since he was a child, but who else? No one that Brenda knew of. Other relatives that she didn’t know of? Maybe. And then there had been his mother, except she had been drowned when he was little more than a baby.

  Drowned, yes, but Harry had been talking to her in his sleep.…

  Brenda shook herself. Why, some of her ideas were almost as morbid as Harry’s! All graveyards and death and maggots. No, of course he wouldn’t be going to see his mother, for they’d never found her body. There would be no grave for him to visit.