Necroscope 4: Deadspeak (22 page)

Wellesley was aware that Clarke’s voice had gone very quiet, and that the man himself was now quite pale. But still he pressed on. “You were there in Hartlepool at the end of the Bodescu affair. You actually
saw
this thing?”

Clarke shuddered. “I saw many … things. I smelled them, too.” He shook his head, as if to clear it of unbearable memories, and pulled himself together. “So what’s your problem, Norman? OK, so during your time here we’ve mainly been dealing with mundane stuff. Well, that is what we deal with, mainly. As for what Harry Keogh, Gormley, Kyle and all the others came up against that time … just hope and pray it’s all done with, that’s all.”

Still Wellesley seemed unconvinced. “It couldn’t have been mass hypnotism, mass illusion, some kind of trick or fraud?”

Again Clarke shook his head. “I have this defence-mechanism thing, remember? You might be able to fool me but not it. It only gets scared when there’s something there to be scared of. It doesn’t run away from harmless illusions, only from real dangers. But it sure as hell propels me away from dead people and undead people and things that would chew my fucking head off!”

For a moment Wellesley seemed lost for an answer to that. Eventually he said: “Would it surprise you to know that I was totally unaware of my own talent? All ray life, I mean, until I applied for a job here?” (This was a lie, but Clarke couldn’t know it.) “I mean, how does one know when one has a
negative
talent? If it was common everyday practice for people to read other people’s minds, then I’d be a freak, the odd man out who couldn’t do it and couldn’t have it done to him. But it isn’t common practice and so I had no measure for it. I only knew—or thought—that I had an interest in parapsychology, the metaphysical. Which is why I mistakenly put in for a transfer here. And then you people checked me out for suitability and discovered I kept my mind in a safe.”

Clarke looked puzzled. “What are you trying to say?”

“I’m not sure myself. I suppose I’m trying to explain why, as the head of E-Branch, I have so much difficulty believing in what we’re doing! And when you confront me with the reality of someone like Harry Keogh … Well, I mean, parapsychology is one thing, but this is supernatural!”

Clarke grinned one of his rare grins. “So you’re human after all,” he said. “Did you think you were alone in your confusion? Why, there’s not a man or woman ever worked here who hasn’t known the same doubts. If I had a pound for every time I’ve thought about it—its ambiguities, inconsistencies and head-on contradictions—hell, I’d be rich! What, an outfit as weird as this is? Robots and romantics? Super-science and the supernatural? Telemetry and telepathy? Computerized probability patterns and precognition? Spy-satellites and scryers? Of course you’re confused. Who isn’t? But that’s what it’s all about: gadgets and ghosts!”

Wellesley was a little happier. He’d managed to get Clarke on his side for once. And with what he had in mind, that’s where he had to have him. “And teleportation?” he said. “Was that one of Keogh’s talents, too?”

Clarke nodded. “That’s what we’d call it,” he said, “but it wasn’t like that to Harry. He simply used doors no one else knew were there. He’d step in a door here and … come out somewhere else. Just about anywhere else. When I wanted to recruit him in on the Perchorsk business, I went up to Edinburgh to see him. He said OK, he’d take a chance if I would. That is, if he was going up against the unknown, he wanted me to taste a little of it too. And he brought me back here through a thing he calls the Möbius Continuum. It was quite something, but nothing I’d ever want to do again.”

Wellesley sighed again and said: “I think you’re right. If he got his talents back, we’d have to offer him my job. You’d like that, right?”

Clarke shrugged.

“Don’t be coy, Darcy,” Wellesley nodded, knowingly. “It’s plain as day. You’d rather have him—or anyone—as your boss than me. But what you don’t seem to realize is that I’m all for it! I don’t understand you or the people who work here and I don’t suppose I ever will. I want out, but I know our Minister Responsible won’t let me go until there’s someone to replace me. You? No, because that would make it look like they made a mistake replacing you in the first place. But Harry Keogh …”

“Harry’s had the best help we can give him,” Clarke said. “We’ve hypnotized him, psychoanalysed him, damn near brainwashed him. But it’s gone. So what can you do for him?”

“It’s more what
we
can do for him, Darcy.”

“Goon.”

“Last night I had a long talk with the Markham girl up in Edinburgh, and —”

“If there’s one part of this that I really hate,” Clarke heatedly cut in, “it’s that we’ve done this to him!”

“—And she advised me to speak to David Bettley,” Wellesley continued, unperturbed, “because she’s worried about Keogh. Can you understand that? She does have genuine feelings for him. It may be just a job but she
is
worried about him. Or maybe you think he’d be better off on his own? Well, whichever, she satisfies two needs: one in Keogh, and one in us. The need to know what’s on his mind.”

“The tender art of the mindspy!” Clarke snorted.

“So I took her advice and spoke to Bettley. I got him out of bed to answer his telephone. I would have contacted him anyway, about some of his most recent reports and recordings; because in them he’s given me cause to believe that Keogh is (a) about to develop some strange new talent, or (b) he’s on the point of cracking up. Anyway, in the course of our conversation Bettley mentioned how Keogh first discovered this, er, Möbius thing—?”

“The Möbius Continuum.”

“—Correct. He’d apparently been on the verge of it but needed a spur. Which came when the East German GREPO found him talking to Möbius in a Leipzig graveyard. That did it, triggered his mathematical genius. He teleported—or used the Continuum—to escape from them. That’s why I have his file here: I wanted to check that I had it right. And it’s also why I’m double-checking with you.”

“So?”

“The way I see it,” Wellesley continued, “Keogh’s like a computer that’s suffered a power failure: the information he requires—and which E-Branch wants to use—is no longer accessible to him. Oh, it’s probably still in there but it’s jammed in limbo. And so far we haven’t been able to shake it loose.”

“What do you propose?”

“Well, I’m still working on it. But the way I see it, if we apply just the right spur … with a bit of luck it could be Leipzig all over again. You see, Keogh has been having some bad dreams lately; and if what you say of him is true—oh, I don’t doubt it, but nevertheless
if—
then any dream awful enough to frighten him must be really bad. But perhaps not quite bad enough, eh?”

“You want to scare him silly?”

“I want to scare him almost to death. So close to death that he escapes into the Möbius Continuum!”

Clarke sat still and silent for long moments, until eventually Wellesley leaned forward and quietly said:

“Well, what do you think?”

“My honest opinion?”

“Of course.”

“I think it stinks. Also, I think that if you plan to fool with Keogh you’d better take out extra insurance. And finally I think that it had better work, because if it doesn’t I’m up and gone. When this is finished, no matter how it works out, I won’t be able to work with you any longer.”

Wellesley smiled thinly. “But you do want me out of here, right? And so you won’t… hinder me?”

“No, in fact I insist on being part of it. That way I can be sure that if Harry has any breaks coming, he’ll get them.”

Wellesley continued to smile.
Oh, he’ll get his breaks, all right,
he thought.
Broken all the way through, in fact!

And he was one of only a handful of men in the entire world who could think such things—especially here in E-Branch HQ—and be certain that no one could hear him doing it.

VI: Sandra

S
ANDRA
M
ARKHAM WAS TWENTY-SEVEN, POSSESSED A
beautiful face and figure, and was a neophyte telepath. As yet her talent was a fifty-fifty thing; she had very little control over it; it came and went. But where Harry Keogh was concerned, that might be just as well. Sometimes, in Harry’s mind, she’d read things she was sure had no right to be there—or in any sane mind, for that matter.

She and Harry had made love only an hour ago, and afterwards he had at once fallen asleep. Sandra had come to know Harry’s habits well enough: he’d stay asleep for three or four hours, which for him would serve as a full night’s rest. As for Sandra: she would have to sleep tomorrow, at her own place in Edinburgh, making up the night’s deficiency.

Staring right into Harry’s pale, relaxed, almost little-boyish face, she saw no sign as yet of the rapid eye movements which would tell her that he was dreaming. So for now she too could relax. It was Harry’s dreams which most interested her. That was what she tried to keep telling herself, anyway.

She worked for E-Branch. Sometimes she wished she didn’t, but she did. That was how she earned her daily bread (the meat and gravy, too), so she really shouldn’t complain. And in fact there hadn’t been too much to complain about, until Harry came along. At first he’d been just another job—a new friend to get close to, learn about and try to understand—but then she’d got in deeper. It had “just happened”, and afterwards she’d wanted it to happen again, and again. Until in a little while he wasn’t just a job but more a way of life, not only “on her mind”, as it were, but under her skin as well. And finally she’d started to suppose, and still did, that she was in love with him.

Certainly working on Harry’s case (she hated thinking of it like that, but it was the truth however she dressed it up) had been more interesting than being a human divining rod on cases the police couldn’t solve. That was how E-Branch used her, usually: to eavesdrop criminal minds—the minds of prisoners in their cells, too tough for the law to crack—looking for those damning clues which more orthodox methods couldn’t turn up. Which would be satisfying enough work in itself, if only she didn’t actually have to go
in
there. Because minds like those were often cesspools, which frequently left her knowing how sewers smell. And sometimes, especially if it was a brutal murder or rape, the smell could linger for a long, long time.

Which was probably the reason she’d fallen in love with Harry Keogh. Because
his
mind was a field of daisies … most of the time. In fact he had the gentlest mind she’d ever come across: not soft, no way! Not even naive, though there was something of that in him too, but just … just gentle. Harry wouldn’t much like hurting anything, or anybody.

With Sandra’s looks it would be strange if there had been no men. There had been men, a few. But her talent wasn’t something she could just switch on and off. Indeed that was its one big drawback: without so much as a by your leave, it came and went. Tonight a man would wine and dine you, take you home and kiss your hand on your doorstep, and ask to see you again. And as you were about to say yes his mind would open like a book and you would see him in there like some great rutting satyr—and you’d be in there with him. Not all men, no, but enough.

But that wasn’t all; there was also the deceit; the fact that people lie. Like the neighbour in the flat next door who smiles and says, “Good morning,” to you on the stairs, when she’s actually thinking:
Piss off and die, you ugly bitch!
Or the hairdresser who makes small talk while he does your hair, and you suddenly hear him thinking:
God, they pay me nine pounds an hour for this! She must have more money than sense, the stupid cow!

Oh, there had been men, all right. The good-looking ones who only worried how
they
looked. And the not-so-good lookers whose minds seethed with jealousy if anyone else even smiled at you. And then, having got safely through an entire week of evenings with a “perfect” companion, to have him make love to you and lie there beside you in your bed, wondering if he’ll have time for another and still catch the last bus home.

It was life and Sandra knew it, and she’d learned to live with it ever since her middle teens when the thing had first started to develop in her. But it hadn’t left much room for “love”. Not until Harry, anyway.

He was such … an anomaly.

She’d read his file, as well as his mind. He had killed men, a great many. That’s what it said in his file. But it didn’t say he remembered and regretted almost every one of them, or how every now and then he’d get the urge to go back and tell them he was sorry, but really he’d had no choice. It didn’t say he still had nightmares about some of the things he’d seen and done. And anyway, Sandra really couldn’t believe half of the things credited (credited? Or better perhaps, ascribed?) to him. Her own talent was paranormal, yes, but what Harry could do—what he’d used to do—was supernatural. And he’d used his powers the best way he knew how. He had killed many men with them, but he’d never murdered a one.

Sandra
knew
how murderers thought, and they didn’t think like Harry Keogh. Their thoughts were deep and dark as red wine, but tumbled as a rough sea, and full of shoals and eddies; while his were clear spring water over rounded pebbles. Oh, his mind could be sharp, too; there were plenty of daggers in there, if you gave him cause to whet them; but they were clearly visible at all times, not hidden away, neither afraid of themselves nor of detection. No, there were no dark corners or mean streets in Harry’s mind. Or if there were, he wasn’t the one to dwell on or in them.

And in that same moment, lying there beside him, Sandra knew how she’d defined him. He was, could only be, one of two things: either completely amoral, or naturally innocent. And since she knew there was no lack of morality, that made him an innocent. A bloody innocent, but nevertheless blameless. A child with blood on his hands and on his conscience and in his nightmares, which he had chosen to keep to himself except when they were unbearable, when he went to Bettley. Well, she wasn’t sure what that made Bettley—a Judas-priest? A father confessor who told?—but she couldn’t be happy with what it made her. And the most terrible thing of all, she believed he half-suspected. Which would explain why he was never completely at his ease with her, and why he couldn’t seem to enjoy her the way she wanted him to, the way she enjoyed him. Christ, to have found a man like Harry, only to discover that of all men he was the one she probably couldn’t have! Not the way she wanted him, anyway.