Deadspawn

'Nothing,' Harry told him. 'What about Janos's set-up in the islands?'

'Gone!' said the other with finality. 'All of it. All of them. But I still have a few men out there - just looking -just to be on the safe side.'

Harry's face was pale and grim but he forced a strange, sad smile. 'That's right, Darcy,' he said. 'Always be on the safe side. Never take chances. Not with things like that.'

There was something in his voice; Clarke looked at the Necroscope out of the corner of his eye, carefully, unobtrusively examining him yet again as they entered the shade of a broad courtyard, with gaunt buildings rising on three sides. 'Are you going to tell me how it was?'

'No.' Harry shook his head. 'Later, maybe. And maybe not.' He turned and looked Clarke straight in the eye. 'One vampire's pretty much like another. Hell, what can I tell you about them that you don't already know? You know how to kill them, that's a fact...'

Clarke stared directly into the black, enigmatic lenses of the other's glasses. 'You're the one who showed us how, Harry,' he said.

Harry smiled his sad smile again, and apparently casually - but Clarke suspected very deliberately - reached up a hand and took off his glasses. Not for a moment turning his face away, he folded the glasses and put them into his pocket. And: 'Well?' he said.

Clarke's jaw fell open as he backed off a stumbling pace, barely managing to contain the sigh - of relief -which he felt welling inside. Caught off balance (again), he looked into the other's perfectly normal, unwavering brown eyes and said: 'Eh? What? Well?'

'Well, where are we going?' Harry answered, with a shrug. 'Or are we already there?'

Clarke gathered his wits. 'We're there,' he said. 'Almost.'

He led the way down stone steps and under an arch, then through a heavy door into a stone-flagged corridor. As they emerged into the corridor, a Military Policeman came erect and saluted. Clarke didn't correct his error, merely nodded, led Harry past him. Halfway along the corridor a middle-aged man - unmistakably a policeman for all that he wore civilian clothing - guarded an iron-banded door of oak.

Again Clarke's nod, and the plain-clothes man swung the door open for him and stepped aside.

'Now we're there,' Harry pre-empted Clarke, causing him to close his mouth on those selfsame words, unspoken. Harry Keogh needed no one to tell him there was a dead person close by. And with one more glance at the Necroscope, Clarke ushered him inside. The officer didn't follow them but closed the door quietly behind them.

The room was cool: two walls were of natural stone; a rocky outcrop of volcanic gneiss grew out of the stone-flagged floor in one corner and into the walls there. This place had been built straight on to the rock. A storeroom, steel shelving was stacked on one side. On the other, beside the cold stone wall: a surgical trolley with a body on it, and a white rubber sheet covering the body.

The Necroscope wasted no time. The dead held no terrors for Harry Keogh. If he had as many friends among the living, then he'd be the most loved man in the world. He was the most loved man, but the ones who loved him couldn't tell anyone about it. Except Harry himself.

He went to the trolley, drew back the rubber sheet from the face, closed his eyes and rocked back on his heels. She had been sweet and young and i

She would need comforting. The teeming dead - the Great Majority - would have tried, but they didn't always get it right. Their voices were often mournful, ghostly, frightening, to anyone who didn't know them. In the darkness of death they could seem like night visitants, nightmares, like wailing banshees come to steal a soul. She might think she was dreaming, might even suspect that she was dying, but not that she was already dead. That took time to sink in, and the freshly dead were usually the last to know. That was because they were the least able to accept it. Especially the very young, whose young minds had not yet properly considered it.

But on the other hand, if she had actually seen death coming - if she had read it in the eyes of her destroyer, felt the numbing blow, or the hands on her throat, closing off the air, or the cutting edge of the instrument of her destruction, slicing into her flesh - then she would know. And she'd be cold and afraid and tearful. Tearful, yes, for no one knew better than Harry how the dead could cry.

He hesitated, wasn't sure how best to approach her, not even sure if he should approach her, not now. For Harry knew that she'd been pure, and that he was impure. True, her flesh was heading for corruption even now, but there's corruption and there's corruption...

Angrily, he thrust the thought aside. No, he wasn't a defiler. Not yet. He was a friend. He was the only friend. He was the Necroscope.

Be that as it may, when he put his hand on her clay-cold brow she recoiled as from a serpent! Not physically, for she was dead, but her mind cringed, shrank down, withdrew into itself like the feathery fronds of some strange sea anemone brushed by a swimmer. Harry felt his blood turn to ice and for a moment stood in horror of himself. The last thing he'd wanted was to frighten her still more.

He wrapped her in his thoughts, in what had once been the warmth of his deadspeak: It's all right! Don't be afraid! I won't hurt you! No one can ever hurt you again! It was as easy as that. Without even trying, he'd told her that she was dead.

But in the next moment he knew that she had already known: KEEP OFF! Her deadspeak was a sobbing shriek of torment in Harry's mind. GET AWAY FROM ME, YOU FILTHY... THING!

As if someone had touched him with naked electric wires, Harry jerked where he stood beside her, jerked and shuddered as he relived, with her, the girl's last moments. Her last living, breathing moments, but not the last things she had known. For in certain mercifully rare circumstances - and at the command of certain monstrous men - even dead flesh can be made to feel again.

In a nightmarishly subliminal sequence, a series of flickering, kaleidoscopic, vividly ghastly pictures flashed on the screen of the Necroscope's metaphysical mind and then were gone. But after-images remained, and Harry knew that these wouldn't go away so easily; indeed, that they would probably remain for a long time. He knew it as surely as he now knew what he was dealing with, because he'd dealt with such a thing before.

That one's name had been... Dragosani!

This one, this poor girl's murderer, had been like that -like Dragosani, a necromancer - but in one especially hideous respect he'd been still worse than that. For not even Dragosani had raped his corpse victims!

But it's over now, he told the girl. He can't come back. You're safe now.

He felt the shuddering of her thoughts receding, replaced by the natural curiosity of her incorporeal mind. She wanted to know him, but for the moment felt afraid to know anything. She wanted, too, to know her condition, except that was probably the most frightening thing of all. But in her own small way she was brave, and she had to know for sure.

Am I... (her deadspeak voice was no longer a shriek but a shivery tremor) am I really...?

Yes, you are, Harry nodded, and knew that she'd sense the movement even as all the teeming dead sensed his every mood and motion. But... (he stumbled), I mean... it could be worse!

He'd been through all of this before, too often, and it never got any easier. How do you convince someone recently dead that it could be worse? 'Your body will rot and worms will devour it, but your mind will go on. Oh, you won't see anything - it will always be dark, and you'll never touch or taste or smell anything again - but it could be worse. Your parents and loved ones will cry over your grave and plant flowers there, seeking to visualize in their blooms something of your face and form; but you won't know they're there or be able to speak to them and say, "Here I am!" You won't be able to reassure them that "It could be worse."'