Necroscope

For the next two years she enjoyed a social life limited only by her tiny allowance, until by the winter of '55 she had met and married an Edinburgh man twenty-five years her senior, a banker in the city. He was Gerald Snaith, and he and Mary had been very happy for all the gap in their age groups, living in a large house in its own private grounds not far from Bo

Harry 'Keogh' was therefore born Harry Snaith just nine months after his grandmother died in 1957 - and just a year before his banker father would follow her, dying from a stroke in his office at the bank.

Mary Keogh was a strong girl and still very young. She had already sold the old family house by the sea and now found herself sole beneficiary of her husband's not inconsiderable estate. Deciding to get away from Edin­burgh for a little while, in the spring of '59 she had come down to Harden and hired a house until the end of July, spending a lot of time in becoming reconciled with her brother and in getting to know his new wife. During that time she saw how his business was declining and helped out with sufficient hard cash to tide him over.

It was then, too, that Michael first detected an aura of sadness or hopelessness about his sister. When he asked what was bothering her (other, of course, than the recent death of her husband, which still weighed heavily) she reminded him of their mother's 'sixth sense', her psychic sensitivity. She believed she had inherited something of it; it 'told' her that she would not have a long life. That didn't worry her unduly - what would be would be - but she did worry about little Harry. What would become of him, if anything should happen to her while he was still a child?

It was unlikely that Michael Keogh and his wife, Je

if anything should 'happen' to Mary - a prediction which, while her brother himself put little store by it, Mary seemed strongly inclined, indeed resolved, towards - then she would not need to let it concern her. Of course her brother and his wife would bring up little Harry as their own. The 'promise' was made more to put her mind at rest than as a real promise as such.

When Harry was two his mother met and was 'swayed' by a man only two or three years older than herself, one Viktor Shukshin, an assumed dissident who had made his way to the West in pursuit of a political haven, or at least political freedom, such as Mary Keogh's mother had done in 1920. Perhaps Mary's fascination with Shukshin was due to this 'Russian co

Michael Keogh had met Shukshin at his sister's wed­ ding, and again, briefly, while on a touring holiday in Scotland - but after that... only at the inquest. For in the winter of '63 Mary Keogh died, as she had predicted, at only thirty-two years of age. Of Shukshin himself Ha

As to Mary's death:

She had been a skater, had loved the ice. A river within view of the house near Bo

Beneath the ice, the river had been swollen, rushing, at the time of the accident. Downriver were many little backwaters where Mary's body might have been washed up under the ice, remaining there until the thaw. Lots of mud had been washed down out of the hills, too, and this had doubtless covered her. At any rate, her body was never found.

Within six months Michael had fulfilled his promise; Harry 'Keogh' had gone to live with his uncle and aunt in Harden. This had suited Shukshin; Harry had not been his child, and he was in any case middling with children and did not feel inclined to bring the boy up on his own. Mary's will had made good provision for Harry; the house and the rest of her estate went to the Russian. To Michael Keogh's knowledge, Shukshin lived there yet; he had not re-married but gone back to giving private tuition in German and Russian. He still gave lessons at the house near Bo

Dramatic as his family history might seem, still, all in all, Harry Keogh's begi

But he did not.

It was an evening some three weeks later, four or five days after Keogh had left Harden Modern Boys' for the Tech., when Ha

Up in Ha

Dragging the trunk downstairs, he had started to empty it, glancing again at old photographs unseen for many a year, and putting aside items which might be useful at school (several old text-books, for example) until he'd come across a large leatherbound notebook full of notes and jottings in his father's hand. Something about the pattern and layout of his father's work had held his eye for a moment... until it dawned on him just exactly what it was - or what he thought it was.

In the next moment that awful inexplicable chill had come again to strike Ha