Deadspawn

It had been Clarke's intention to stop at the guardroom and speak to the policemen there. But now, pale as a ghost, he reeled to the castle's low wall. Clutching its masonry for support, he gulped at the gusting air and fought down the bile he felt rising from the churning of his guts.

And: 'Jesus, Jesus!' he choked. For he could see it all now and there was nothing he could do to cleanse the picture from his mind's eye. Weird sex? God, what an understatement!

Harry had followed Clarke to the wall. The head of E-Branch looked at him sideways from a watery eye. 'He ... he digs holes in those poor kids, then makes love to the holes!'

'Love?' the Necroscope hissed. 'His flesh ruts in blood like a pig's snout ruts in soil, Darcy! Except the soil can't feel! Didn't the police tell you where he leaves his semen?'

Clarke's eyes were swimming and his brow feverish, but he felt his nausea being replaced by a cold loathing almost as strong as the Necroscope's own. No, the police hadn't told him that, but now he knew. He looked out over the blurred city and asked: 'How do you know he knows they feel it?'

'Because he talks to them while he's doing it,' Harry told him, mercilessly. 'And when they cry out in their agony and beg him to stop, he hears them. And he laughs!'

Clarke thought: Christ, I shouldn't have asked! And you - you bastard, Harry Keogh - you shouldn't have told me!

With fury in his eyes, he turned to face the Necroscope... and faced thin air. A wind blew up the esplanade and tourists leaned into it, balancing themselves. Overhead, seagulls cried where they spiralled on a rising thermal.

But Harry was no longer there...

Later, with Clarke's help, Harry fixed it that Pe

Clarke hadn't wanted to do it but he owed Harry. For a good many things. And he wanted very badly to catch the maniac who had done this thing to Pe

He certainly wouldn't have gone along with it if Zek Föener had stood firm on her first... accusation? Or if not an accusation, a premonition at least.

Zek was a telepath and as loyal to the Necroscope as they came. In the Greek islands at the end of the Ferenczy business, she'd had occasion to try and contact Harry with her mind, during the course of which something had shocked her rigid. But it had been a while before she could tell Clarke what it was. They had been on the island of Rhodes at the time, less than a month ago, and their conversation was still fresh in his mind.

'What is it, Zek?' he'd said to her, when he could talk to her in private. 'I saw that change come over your face when you contacted Harry. Is he in some sort of trouble?'

'No - yes - I don't know!' she'd answered, fear and frustration audible in her every word, visible in her every move. Then she'd looked at him and it was that same, strange, disbelieving look he'd seen when she tried to contact Harry: as if she gazed on alien things, in a distant world beyond the times and places we know. And he remembered that indeed she had once been in just such a world, with Harry Keogh. A world of vampires!

'Zek,' he'd said then, 'if there's something I should know about Harry, it's only fair that - '

' - Only fair to who?' She had cut him off. To whom? To ... what? And is it fair to him?'

At which Clarke had felt an icy chill in his blood. And: 'I think you'd better explain,' he'd said.

'I can't explain!' she'd snapped at him. 'Or maybe I can.' And then the empty expression in her beautiful eyes had filled itself in a little, and her tone had become more reasonable, even pleading. 'It's just that every other mind I've touched in the last few days has seemed to be one of them! So maybe I've started to find them where... where there aren't any? Where they can't possibly be?'

And then he'd known for certain what she was trying to tell him. 'You mean that when you contacted Harry, you sensed - ?'

'Yes - yes!' she'd snapped again. 'But I could be mistaken. I mean, isn't that what he's doing at this very moment, going up against them? He's close to vampires right now, even as we talk. It could be one of them I sensed. God, it has to be one of them...'

End of conversation, but it hadn't been out of Clarke's mind from that day to this. When it was time to leave the islands and come home again, he had asked Zek if she'd like to visit England, as a guest of E-Branch.

Her answer had been more or less what he expected: 'You're not fooling anyone, Darcy. And anyway I don't like the idea that you would want to fool me, not after all of this. So I'll tell you straight out: I detest the E-Branches, whether they're Russian, British, whoever they belong to! No, not the espers themselves but the way they're used, the fact that they need to be used at all. As for Harry: I won't go against the Necroscope.' And she'd given her head a very definite shake. 'We were on different sides once before, Harry and me, and he gave me some good advice. "Never again go up against me or mine," he said, and I never will. I've seen inside his mind, Darcy, and I know that when someone like Harry says something like that to you, you'd better listen to him. So if there are... problems, well, they're your problems, not mine.'

It had been the kind of answer to make him worry all the more.

Back in London after the Greek expedition, at E-Branch HQ, a mass of work had built up. During the first few days back at his desk Clarke had cleared or at least begun to clear quite a lot of it, and had also managed to clear his mind of much of the horror of the Ferenczy job. But nightmares kept him awake most nights. One in particular was very bad and very persistent.

This was the essence of it: they (Clarke, Zek, Jazz Simmons, Ben Trask, Manolis Papastamos: most of the Greek team, with the important exception of Harry Keogh) were in a boat that lolled gently on an absolutely flat ocean. It was so blue, that sea, that it could only be the Aegean. A small, stark, sloping island of rock floating on the blue made a gold-rimmed, black silhouette against the blinding refraction of a half-sun where it prepared to dip down beyond the slanting rock of the island into a short-lived twilight. The serenity of the scene was immaculately structured, vivid, real, with nothing in it to hint that it was prelude to nightmare. But since the thing was recurrent - indeed a nightly event - Clarke always knew what was coming and where to look for the start of it.

He would look at Zek, gorgeous in a swimsuit that left little to the imagination, stretched out along a narrow sunbathing platform attached to the upper strakes at the stern. She lay on her stomach, her face turned sideways, with one hand dangling in the water. And the sea so calm that her fingers made ripples. But then...

She glanced sharply at her hand in the water, snatched it out and stared at it, gave a cry of disgust and tumbled herself inboard! Her hand was red, bleeding! No, not bleeding, but bloody - as if it had been dipped in someone else's blood! By which time the entire crew had seen that the sea itself was sullied by a great crimson swath, an elongated splotch like an oilslick (a bloodslick?) which had drifted to surround the boat with its thick, red ribbons.