Necroscope: Harry and the Pirates: and Other Tales from the Lost Years (3 page)

Harry nodded. “Yes, that’s exactly how it was. So then, is this me or isn’t it?”

“Well, it better be,” the other grinned ruefully. “Especially since you’ve been sleeping in my spare bedroom for a week! But even so you tell a damn strange story. Like, you were working for the government on a secret job when you were caught in an explosion that wrecked your face, so they fixed you up with plastic surgery? I mean, how weird is that?”

The Necroscope shrugged. He wasn’t much for lying—certainly not to a friend—but he knew that the truth was stranger
yet. Jimmy
really
wouldn’t have been able to accept the truth, which would have thrown everything else into doubt, causing all sorts of complications. Harry might have had to find other lodgings, for one thing, or go back along the Möbius route to his place on the outskirts of Edinburgh every night, which wasn’t a good idea. He was actually enjoying his time away from that old house, in the company of one of his few
living
friends from his school days, and the trouble with indiscriminate and unnecessary use of the Möbius Continuum was that he might be observed stepping out of nowhere when he arrived back in Harden one morning. Life was difficult enough already, and Harry was an adherent of the creed that the easiest plan is usually the best.

“I mean,” Jimmy went on in that questioning manner of his, “why couldn’t these secret government people fix you up with a younger face? Er, not that you’re ugly, you understand, but was that the best they could do for you?”

Fortunately Harry had seen fit to devise an answer to that one in advance. “They couldn’t just pick and choose, Jimmy!” he said. “And neither could I. This is how it came out, and that’s it. And anyway, it serves a purpose: with these new looks I can go on working undercover, you know?”

Jimmy scratched his head. “My old pal has become some kind of secret agent!” he said. “Harry Keogh, aka 008! So why aren’t you working ‘undercover’ right now—or are you? What, here in Harden? Hell no! No way! Impossible!—unless some crazed terrorist is building a nuclear device in one of Harden’s old mineshafts! Mind you, he’d have to be
really
crazy, because there’s not too much that’s worth blowing to smithereens around here!”

“Ha! Ha!” said Harry, however humourlessly. “No, you know I’m looking for Brenda. See, I’m still a bit, er, shell-shocked after the explosion—just one of the hazards of being a field operative—and this is how I’m using some of my R and R time.” He tried not to look or feel too guilty, and knew that in fact he
wasn’t
guilty; for despite that he was lying now, it wasn’t long ago that the Necroscope
had
been involved—in his unique way, and however involuntarily—in
some vastly important work on behalf of a special branch of Her Majesty’s Secret Services.

Now Jimmy sighed, shook his head, and said, “I still can’t tell whether you’re serious or not! But you’re weird and that’s for sure! What was it you were muttering to yourself when I was coming out of the house? You were asleep, or almost asleep. You were very still and quiet and seemed to be holding your breath, as if you were straining to hear someone or something. Then you began to mumble to yourself and I think I heard you say, ‘What? Who? Where?’ Something questioning like that, anyway. Now what was that all about? A nightmare maybe? Or rather, a daymare?”

Harry shrugged, and answered: “A bad dream? I suppose it’s possible.” And after sipping thoughtfully at his drink, he continued: “In which case maybe I should be grateful that you woke me up, eh? But whatever it was—and since I can’t remember anything about it, it couldn’t have been too important. No, it was just a common—‘or garden’—dream, that’s all. No big deal.”

And perhaps it really wasn’t such a big deal; but now that Jimmy had started him thinking about it—wondering why he’d seemed to be, what, “straining to hear someone or something?”—suddenly Harry wasn’t nearly so sure about that. . . .

The fact was that the Necroscope
had
been hearing—or rather, sensing—things for some time now. The talent he had inherited from his female forebears (a talent which some, including Harry himself, might from time to time more readily consider a curse) was gradually becoming more acute in him. If it had been purely physical, as in diseased, malfunctioning hearing, then it might be diagnosed as tinnitus or a similar disorder. But how to diagnose a
meta
physical—indeed a parapsychological—condition as grotesque as this one, involving things which Harry “heard” not with his ears but with his mind? In a future as yet unimagined and unimaginable, he would name his dubious talent “deadspeak” when using
it to communicate with deceased
people
. As for what he was experiencing now, however—

—While some of the things that “spoke” to or “informed” him were most definitely dead, they were
not
always people. . . .

In addition to which, there were perfectly normal mechanical sounds which Harry heard, naturally enough, with his ears. Out in the privacy of Jimmy’s walled garden, for instance, the buzzing of bees in the roses and flower borders wasn’t the only sound; there was also the infrequent drone of an airplane from on high, the sound of traffic from the main coast road, even the near-distant
clicketty-clack
of steel wheels on rails, wafting on the balmy summer air right across the sleepy village from Harden’s old railway viaduct.

Of course, these were sounds that Harry heard like so much white noise—sounds he expected to hear—which in no way registered as other than ordinary. . . .

In that selfsame garden, however, beneath the overhang of inward-sloping terra-cotta tiles where they decorated the top of the high wall, several spiders had their webs, all more or less evenly spaced out so as to avoid territorial disputes. In those web larders of the spiders, the tiny corpses of flying—or at least once-flying—insects were neatly cocooned and hung like game to ripen. If Harry were to concentrate on these small dead creatures he would actually—and
had
actually—become conscious of a certain sensation, awareness or intuition: the merest glimmer, as faint in his unique mind as the fantasised sound of a snowflake’s fall to earth might be in his ears. He had traced this
un
-sound to the fly mummies under the tiles.

And yet this was more than mere intuition, for Harry sensed the surprise, bewilderment, even the
indignation
of the drained midges. It was in a way “sentience”—according to that word’s definition, at least—if not as men would normally understand and accept it. But in his mind it registered as a question—or more properly an infinitely small “why?”—to which there could never
be any answer that the insects framing the question would understand.

They only understood that the freedoms they had known were no more, that their aerial scavenging and pheromone-driven contact with others of their species—natural pleasures of eating and mating—had been suspended, replaced by this abrupt denial of flight. Then there had been the struggle that shook the web, and the rapid approach of the terror that these silken vibrations had so swiftly summoned; finally the paralysing bite that had frozen life to a halt, leaving only the darkness.

And in the absence of everything they had known—as individuals deprived of life while yet they had no concept of death—these cocooned insects could only ask, “Why?”

Which was the “why?” that the Necroscope heard.

Deprived individuals, yes. But—

—In sharp contrast, three inches underground, in a sandy border at the rim of a path where the crazy-paving was cracked, the bodies of a veritable community, an almost entire colony of one of Nature’s smallest ant species—insects only a few millimetres in length—were heaped in what was meant to have been a last-ditch attempt at providing a protective phalanx around a pile of glistening, tiny white eggs. The colony had been killed off by Jimmy Collins after he noticed a lot of ant activity and all the damage their excavations were doing to his path. It was truly astonishing that anything so insignificant could make any impression on the world at all, but small heaps of soil and the dust of crumbling mortar were ample evidence of just how effective the ants had been in undermining his garden path.

Also evident (at least to the Necroscope) the massed cry of distress and total panic that Harry could “hear” or sense issuing from the poisoned hive. Faint as the deadspeak cries of the enshrouded flies, yet totally different in nature, these myriad voices had one theme, one concern, and issued forth as from the mind of one creature. “Survive!” that massed voice cried, despite that Jimmy and his insecticide had seen to it that survival was no longer an option.
“Survive! . . . Save the eggs! . . . Protect the young queens!” But of course, for they were the entire future of a hundred hives yet to be!

Not even a whisper in the Necroscope’s mind—nothing more than intuition—yet still he knew that once again dead things were crying out against the immobility, negativity, and unknown darkness of death. But as with the cocooned flies it was knowledge he could ignore,
must
ignore because there was nothing he could do about it. The world seemed to be full of dead things; even the soil underfoot was made of dead things! And if indeed the Necroscope tried to accept or empathise with every thought, message, or feeling—with every ache or echo from beyond—it would surely mean the end of him.

And so Harry was having to learn to put this side effect—this parallel or ancillary phenomenon of his talent—aside and make white noise of it, as he did with so much of what he heard with his ears, just like every other human being whose hearing is not impaired. And he was succeeding, except—

—“Hey, are you all right?” Jimmy Collins’ concerned query from the shade of the doorway finally got through to the Necroscope. Jimmy had been absent for a few minutes only, topping up their drinks in his kitchen, and Harry had half-dozed off again—or so Jimmy supposed. He could scarcely be blamed for believing this was so, for on returning to the garden he’d discovered his guest with his arms folded on his chest, head down, and hat low over his eyes, as still as a man deeply asleep. But in fact Harry had been wrapt in concentration . . . listening . . . listening . . .
listening
! If not with his ears.

Listening to the incorporeal, yes, but not to anything as inconsequential (however remarkable) as ant and fly murmurings; not now that a yet more remarkable phenomenon had arrested his attention, and not now that he recognised it as something very different and
very
strange.

“Eh?” Starting—giving a pretty good impression of someone freshly shocked awake—Harry jerked upright in his deck chair. “I . . . I must have drifted off again! So now you can see how it is
with me. Like I told you, I’m still sort of shell-shocked. I can’t seem to stay awake for more than a couple of minutes at a time.” He offered a shrug. “But perhaps it’s just that I’m warm and comfortable here, and the place is so peaceful and all. . . .”

Jimmy was concerned, and the Necroscope felt bad about it: that he had conned his old friend like that. But it was part of the action that he now intended to take. “I think I’ll just—” he began to say. But Jimmy cut him off with:

“And
I
think you’ll be better off taking a nap indoors! If you go to sleep with your mouth open out here, you’re likely to come a cropper. It’s just a fortnight ago that I got stung by a wasp inside my lip doing just that—falling asleep in the garden. It still hurts, even to talk about it!” But:

“No, I don’t think so,” said Harry, standing up and accepting the drink that Jimmy handed him. “I’ll drink this, and then I think I’ll go for a walk—towards Hazeldene, maybe? Get some fresh air into my lungs, see if I can shake off this dull sloth or lethargy or whatever it is.” He took a long pull at his soft drink, almost finishing it in one go.

“Well, you’ll know best.” Jimmy shrugged. “You’ll be going on your own, though. There are a few jobs around the house I’ve been meaning to get done.”

“In which case I’ll see you when I see you,” said Harry as he handed his friend his almost empty glass, then stretched and grimaced before heading for the garden gate.

As Harry opened the gate, Jimmy’s frown displayed his continuing concern. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Absolutely,” said the other. “You’ll see. By tonight I’ll be my old self again and full of the devil.”

Finally Jimmy laughed, and said, “Full of the devil? Okay, but if you don’t get
too
full, maybe later on tonight we’ll top up with Old Nick down at the pub! That’s if you’re up to it.”

“Well, maybe,” said Harry. “We’ll see.” With which he went through the gate into a lane lined with a hedge, and headed for a stile that climbed over and down onto a narrow path. The path led off into knee-deep, grassy meadows with hilly ground rising beyond.
That way, maybe two miles distant, lay Hazeldene’s forested valley, which was where this other—but this other what? This metaphysical interference maybe, or mental static?—this other “sound” anyway, seemed to have its origin. But if only it wasn’t so hard to pin down, so very faint!

Unnaturally faint, when considering its
human
origin! Even as faint, and indeed fainter, than massed dead-ant hysteria or deceased-fly musings. But what sort of communication could this possibly be? Which was exactly what the Necroscope intended to discover, and ASAP. More especially so because he knew instinctively that however remote or suppressed its source, this was a concerted cry of horror, which to him was the same as an SOS: a cry or cries for help.

But an SOS from the grave? Now what could the dead have to fear? A question which only the Necroscope could answer. And in fact he knew that there were indeed things that the dead should fear, for he had met up with several of them before. . . .

The sun blazed down, and even under the wide brim of his floppy hat Harry felt its heat. Using a handkerchief to mop sweat from the back of his neck, he sought respite on a bench in the shade of a flowering elder. Having crossed the fields to the high back road, he could now look down across Harden to the landmark viaduct and the North Sea that sprawled beyond. The sea, once grey from coal-mine spoil, was bluer than Harry had seen it in a long time; but then he hadn’t been back this way since . . . how long? Last summer, perhaps? The one before that? In any case, he knew the blue was simply the reflection of a mainly cloudless sky.