Necroscope: Harry and the Pirates: and Other Tales from the Lost Years (6 page)

Now he studied the man more closely, albeit as unobtrusively as possible. Five ten or close to; lank, mousy hair; gangly limbs and a somewhat unbalanced or lopsided stance; and a long, oh-so-sad, deeply lined face—even an old face on his youngish body. So maybe he wasn’t so young after all. Whichever, it appeared that he was aware of the Necroscope’s scrutiny, and as if he’d read Harry’s mind he said, “I don’t fit the picture, do I? I don’t look the type that policemen go around beating up on.”

“No, you don’t.” Shaking his head, Harry again offered his hand. “I’m Harry Keogh. I lived in Harden and grew up here, but right now I’m just a visitor.”

“Greg Miller.” The other took his hand and shook it. “I
do
still live here, and some people resent it: Constable Forester, for instance. But, as I believe I already mentioned, he has his reasons.
Anyway, I’m thankful for your timely intervention. Not that he would have hurt me too much. He never does.”

“Really?” said Harry, feeling utterly baffled. “Well look, er, Greg?” (But Greg Miller? A name that rang certain bells out of the past? It seemed possible.) “While I know it’s none of my business, would you mind . . . I mean do you think you could perhaps explain some of that? You mentioned double jeopardy, which hints of a crime. Your crime, maybe?”

“You’re dead right, Harry,” the other told him, “it’s none of your business. And as for explaining my ‘crime’: well yes, I
do
mind! So please excuse me, but if you don’t already know the story I’m not about to enlighten you. It was a long time ago and . . . look, I’ve been called a lunatic far too often already! But just wait and see. Eventually it will happen again, and when it does they’ll all . . .
huh
!” Pausing abruptly, Miller gave a massive start and glanced anxiously at the green wall of Hazeldene some hundred and fifty yards away. And as a puff of cotton-wool cloud passed unhurriedly over the face of the sun and the shadows grew longer in the ruined farmyard, so the colour seemed to drain from his face and he quite visibly shivered.

“Greg?” said the Necroscope, suddenly aware of an ominous darkening—not only of the light but of the atmosphere—and of an oppressive weirdness here. “Now what in the name of . . . ?”

But as the cloud passed and the farmyard was flooded with sunlight once more, so the other looked at him, shook his head, and in a husky dust-dry voice said, “That’s right, Harry, don’t ask—because you just wouldn’t understand. You have to be able to
feel
it, to have
known
it, to understand it. Which is why no one else understands or believes in it. It’s too . . . it’s just too . . .”

He broke off, shook his head as if lost for words, turned away, and set off determinedly if unsteadily out of the farmyard in the direction of near-distant Hazeldene.

But while Miller couldn’t know it he was in part mistaken in what he’d said, because Harry had definitely felt something. On the other hand he was also right in that Harry didn’t understand
it . . . at least not yet. But for a fact Miller’s name had found resonance in the Necroscope’s memory, making a connection that only served to increase his curiosity. And so:

“You think I wouldn’t understand?” said Harry, following a few paces behind the other. “So why not try me? I’m no stranger to fantastic stories, Greg. I’ve heard—and done—some rather odd things in my time, and I’m a pretty good listener.” (All of which was an absolute understatement if ever there was one.)

But as for Greg Miller: he wasn’t listening at all. And as Harry came to a halt so the other carried on, his gaze fixed on Hazeldene’s green border rising up unbroken beyond a field that had lain fallow for too many years.

The Necroscope watched him until he merged with the rim of the woods, then shook himself mentally and thought to return to the other half of his original plan: to triangulate the phantom voices. But alas when he concentrated, when he tried to tune in on them with his esoteric talent, they were no longer there. It felt almost as if . . . as if they had deliberately shut down. In fact he might even take it one step further and say he believed that
they had been
shut down, and that whatever it was that had controlled or restricted their volume previously—causing them to be so faint—that same power was now blanketing, smothering their cries to total silence. . . .

Back in the farm ruins Harry hid himself away in the shell of a roofless room, conjured a Möbius door, and used it to return to the co-ordinates of Jimmy Collins’ garden just inside the gate. The high walled garden was exactly as he’d left it: with a pair of deck chairs facing each other across five feet of neatly cropped grass. Somewhere inside the house Jimmy was whistling as he worked, breaking off now and then as he remembered the words to various parts of a song by Elvis Presley, and singing them. Not a bad impersonation at that, thought Harry, wondering what kind of songs Elvis was doing now. Having been dead for a while, the King of
Rock ’n’ Roll would have settled in with many of his own kind, musicians who had gone that way before him. But one thing seemed certain: whatever music they were playing and songs they were singing now, they wouldn’t be dirges!

“Hey!” Harry called out—at which the whistling and singing at once stopped. “Jimmy, I’m back.”

A few moments later Jimmy came out of the house. “Already? You couldn’t have gone very far. What, a couple of hours, maybe less? So where’d you go?”

“Oh, towards the old farm.” The Necroscope was deliberately vague. “But it was just too warm. Up on the back road, I got hot and sticky, decided to come on back. But something happened up there: I met up with this sort of scruffy-looking man called Greg Miller and . . . well, I can’t be sure, but I seem to remember his name in connection with something or other—something bad, I think—when we were kids at school.” For that bell out of Harry’s past was ringing more clearly now, and he had indeed recalled something of an occurrence featuring a man called Greg Miller. Miller, a girl, and—if Harry’s memory served him well—an incident that had outraged this entire north-east region.

Jimmy had been fixing and grouting some tiles in his bathroom; wiping his gritty hands on a rag, he came forward and sat down in one of the deck chairs. Taking the other chair, the Necroscope said, “So, do you remember anything about that?”

Jimmy screwed up his eyes, frowned, and nodded. “I remember something of it, yes. It was the talk of the town. I even heard my old folks whispering about it. Wasn’t Miller a crazy man who murdered his girlfriend and buried her body somewhere in Hazeldene? And if that wasn’t bad enough, she had to be the daughter of a local policeman!”

“Ahhh!” said Harry, feeling the short hairs lifting at the nape of his neck. “Yes, of course. And the policeman’s name? It wouldn’t have been Jack Forester, would it?”

“Forester?” Jimmy was still frowning. And now he shook his
head. “No, I don’t think so. I seem to remember Symonds, Arnold Symonds. In fact I’m sure it was him, yes.”

“You’re sure?” (Now it was Harry’s turn to frown.) “But we were just kids and it was quite some time ago; all of fourteen, maybe even fifteen years? So how is it you’re so sure?”

Jimmy winked knowingly and tapped the side of his nose. It always felt good to get one up on Harry. “Because it was in the
Northern Echo
just a day or so ago,” he said, grinning.

The Necroscope sighed and said, “Okay, Jimmy, go on. What, exactly, was in the newspaper?”

“A list of all the people who’ve jumped off Harden Viaduct since it was built in Victorian times,” Jimmy answered. “It was a hot spot for suicides during the Depression. And I see you’re wondering: why a newspaper article about that now? Because someone left a note saying he intended to jump, that’s why.”

“And did he?”

“No, the fool walked into the sea and drowned himself! But it was a suicide so they did an article on the viaduct anyway.”

“And this Arnold Symonds,” said Harry. “You say he was the father of a girl that Greg Miller is supposed to have killed?”

“A double tragedy.” Jimmy nodded. “The loony Miller kills Symonds’ daughter, and Symonds the local cop—who has already lost his wife to cancer a year earlier—can’t take it anymore so throws himself down from the viaduct. The
Echo
carried these thumbnail sketches on all the suicides, including his.”

“And Miller?”

“A loony, like I said,” Jimmy answered. “A head case. They put him in a high-security madhouse, and a few years ago transferred him to the mental facility at Sedgefield. Until you told me you’d seen him, I thought he was still in there.” He shrugged. “Maybe he’s been cured or done his time or something. Me, I don’t think we should ever have done away with hanging.”

“No, Jimmy, you’re wrong there!” Harry grimaced, shook his head. “It’s a terrifying thing—the so-called ‘dirty death’—to hang
by the neck until you’re dead. I mean, think of all the thoughts chasing each other through your head: the regrets, the bowel-emptying fear as the noose tightens around your neck, the sudden, undeniable knowledge that this is where everything ends . . . until it
really
does end, as it all shuts down and the only thing left is the cold and the crawling darkness. . . .”

Jimmy’s brow had creased up while Harry talked and his jaw had fallen open. Looking at the Necroscope curiously—perhaps even enquiringly—he very quietly said, “Harry, I’m convinced! Heck, the way you make it sound, it’s as if you’ve already
been
there! Like you’re Death’s closest relative, or best friend, or something!”

Or something, yes. Or even
all
of those things!

And glancing back at his friend, Harry thought:
I know a great many things about Death, Jimmy. Oh, a
great
many things!
He wished that he could say it out loud, explain it in detail; but anyway, who would believe him? No, not even Jimmy. Or possibly Jimmy, which could be worse still! And so, saying nothing, he kept the weird truth of the matter to himself—and also to the Great Majority—as always.

When it looked as if Jimmy might be about to question something else, however, the Necroscope quickly stood up, and said: “James, my most excellent friend, I seem to remember you saying something about a beer? So how about it? Are the pubs open yet, do you reckon?” Which seemed as good a way as any to change the suddenly morbid subject: a ploy that Jimmy was only too pleased to fall for, which left any uneasy notion conjured by the Necroscope’s vivid portrayal of death to morph into a sort of mental miasma, a mist that drifted unexamined from his mind. . . .

Early the next morning, Harry rode a bus from Harden into Hartlepool where, in the
Northern Echo
’s dusty archives, he discovered almost everything he desired to know about the Greg Miller case. Much of what he learned corroborated Jimmy Collins’ version of the story; but most important among several new items of interest, the Jack Forester connection finally came to light in an
interview that the constable had given following the suicide of his friend and mentor Arnold Symonds. At last the Necroscope could understand and make sense of Forester’s animosity towards Greg Miller.

The story went like this:

In the summer of 1966, all of fifteen years ago, the then-nineteen-year-old Greg Miller, a coke-oven worker at the colliery, had courted Janet Symonds, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Sergeant Arnold Symonds, who was the senior policeman at the police station in Harden. Janet had been a popular young woman; her charming personality had made her a firm favourite with the staff at the electrical goods factory where she worked in Hartlepool. Where Miller was concerned, however, Janet fell foul of her father, who believed that her choice of a man in “pit black”—a coke-oven worker—was a poor one; for of course Sergeant Symonds had planned better things for her.

Perhaps Symonds—whose wife of twenty years had succumbed to cancer a little over a year earlier, in the spring of 1965—was simply being overprotective of his daughter; or then again, considering the way things were about to work out, perhaps not. Whichever, Janet’s eventual disappearance and presumed death by murder was the final tragedy that broke the policeman’s will to live; more especially after young Greg Miller had told his side of the story, a tale which clearly amounted to a madman’s “confession.” And shortly after Miller had been locked away, Arnold Symonds took his own life by leaping from the viaduct’s central span.

As to Miller’s so-called confession:

That had been brought about by the discovery, at the rim of Hazeldene, of Janet Symonds’ ripped and dishevelled clothing—in particular her underthings—which still had traces of Miller’s semen on them. After that . . . it had to have been obvious to him that he must offer up some sort of alibi or explanation, or else suffer the consequences of such irrefutable, albeit circumstantial, evidence.

As for Miller’s reason for remaining silent to this juncture: it was because he had felt that no one would believe him, which was
more or less what he’d told the Necroscope only yesterday, all these years after the fact.

And as for the “confession” itself:

While admitting that he and Janet Symonds had been lovers, and that they had made love in the shaded fringes of the forest on the day she disappeared, Miller had insisted that he was innocent of her murder. But oh yes,
it had been murder
. . . or more properly the incredible semi-ritualistic entrapment and violent butchery of a young girl, of a sort seldom if ever witnessed or experienced by any man before him.

And the guilty party: that had been a monster, a nightmare in the shape of—

—Of the forest itself! A part of which had turned carnivore, stripped Janet of her clothes and then her flesh, tearing her limb from limb on the very spot where she and Greg had made love!

This was as far as the investigators had allowed Miller to continue with this sick, sexual fantasy of an account, which of course amounted to little more than a grotesque confession; and discovering the facts of these events now, the Necroscope could well imagine what sort of reception such a story—and for that matter what sort of treatment its author—would have received in these rough-and-ready north-eastern parts fifteen years ago.