Deadspawn

Wait! Harry tried to stir himself, sit up and take hold of Möbius's wrist. But he couldn't move and anyway, it would be like trying to grasp smoke. And like a set of his own esoteric formulae, the great man mutated into nothingness and was gone...

If anything Möbius's visit had wearied Harry even more than before. He drifted deeper into sleep. But his vampire-influenced mind was full of a certain name, which tormented him and wouldn't let him be. And the name was Joh

Harry was a telepath; he had a quest, a task which he must finish; and he had a vampire in him. When he had gone to face Faéthor Ferenczy's bloodson Janos in the mountains of Transylvania, the Ferenczy had warned him that only one of them would come out of it alive, and that the wi

Dreaming, he no longer had control over his talents, which were active nevertheless. Dreams are the clearinghouses of the mind, where the balance is kept, the cutting-room where all the junk and trivia of life are discarded and the meaningful set in order. That is the function of men's dreams. That and wish fulfilment. And also, for anyone with a conscience, the elevation of suppressed guilt. Which is why men sometimes nightmare.

Harry had his share of guilt, and more than sufficient of desires requiring fulfilment. And what he himself had failed to put in order during his waking hours, his subconscious self - and the vampire which was part of it - would try to put in order while he slept.

His enhanced awareness spread outwards from him to form a telepathic probe which, in a moment, unerringly, leaped all the miles to its target in Darlington. For that target was the sleeping mind of Joh

And with the sinister guile of the vampire, he need only hint, suggest, propose, strike this chord or maybe that, and with any luck at all Joh

All of it ...

Joh

Childhood memories? Oh, he had them, but he wouldn't say they were worth remembering or dreaming about. Which was why he didn't. Usually.

He tossed a little in his bed; his subconscious mind moaned and went to take up a hammer to nail shut the door to his past; something pushed the hammer aside, beyond his reach, and Joh

They'd tried to convince him that the things he did were bad, and had almost succeeded, but by then he was old enough to know that they lied to him, because they didn't understand. And because they didn't understand, they would never know how good the things were which he did. How good they made him feel.

Yes, it had been a lonely place, childhood, where no one understood him or wanted to know about... the things he did. Because they didn't want even to think of such things, let alone know about them.

Lonely, yes, the place beyond that beckoning door. And how much more lonely if he hadn't had the dead things to talk to? And to play with. And to torment.

But because he'd had that - his secret thing, his clever way with creatures which were no more - being an orphan hadn't been nearly so bad. Because he'd known there were others worse off than him, whose plight was far worse. And that if it wasn't, then Joh

The open door both repelled and attracted him. Beyond it, the mists of memory swirled, eddied and hypnotized him; until - against his will? - Joh

They'd called him 'Found' because he had been, in a church. And the pews had vibrated with his screams, and the rafters had echoed with them, that Sunday morning when the verger had come to see what all the to-do was about. He was still bloody from birth, the foundling, and wrapped in a Sunday newspaper; and the placenta which had followed him into the world still warm in a plastic bag, stuffed under the bench in one of the pews.

But lusty? Joh

In any case, he'd yelled like that until they took him out of the church to the intensive care unit of a local hospital's maternity ward. And only then, away from God's house, had he fallen silent.

The ambulance which whirled him to the hospital carried his mother, too, found seated against a headstone in the churchyard in a pool of her own blood, head lolling on her swollen breasts. Except unlike Joh

A strange start to a strange life, but the strangeness was only just begi

In the intensive-care ward Joh

But when a nurse had looked in on him to see why he'd stopped sobbing and gone quiet so suddenly... that had been the weirdest thing of all. Or perhaps not, depending on one's perspective. For his young mother hadn't been quite dead after all. And perhaps she'd heard the babies crying and had known that one of them was hers. That must be the answer, surely? For what other explanation could there be?

There Joh

Joh

About his foster parents: the Prescotts had kept a large house on the very outskirts of Darlington, where the town met the countryside. At the time they adopted Joh

And yet David Prescott had been uneasy about the boy from the very first time he saw him. It was nothing solid, just - something he could never quite put his finger on - a feeling; but because of it things were just a little less perfect than they should be.

Joh