The Last Aerie (81 page)

“I tried to reach Nathan just as we were about to start using the bench on the door,” Garvey explained. “But there was a telepathic shield round his mind: ‘static’, as we would call it in the Branch. Except … it was cold, cold stuff. Nothing living created it.”

“Must have been Scofield,” Trask nodded.

But Nathan said, “Not necessarily. For there are telepaths among the dead, too. And Keenan Gormley told me they’re trying to help us now.”

“By blocking your mind?” Trask raised an eyebrow.

Nathan shrugged. “Perhaps by protecting it from the worst of what Scofield could do. And if so I’m glad, for what he
did
was bad enough!”

They were back in the Duty Room. Smart made coffee while Nathan told what had happened to him. As he finished his story there came a burst of static from a pocket radio Trask had left sitting on the reports desk.

“Hasn’t worked since we got here,” Trask commented. “Else I might have tried ordering up some cutting gear for that door back there …” Then he frowned. “I told them not to bother us until 11:00
P.M.
, and then to stay in close contact. So why are they trying to get through now?”

White as a sheet, Garvey answered: “Because it’s 11:00
P.M.
, that’s why!” He was staring disbelievingly at his watch, his eyes round as saucers.

And finally they knew about the time. All of their watches told the same story: a story of warped time, the extension of a brief episode into something that had lasted for well over four hours. “What?” Smart wasn’t able to accept it. “We were moving in slow motion or something?”

“Don’t concern yourself with it,” Trask told him. “It can drive you crazy trying to figure it out. It’s just another one of those weird things that can happen in the Nightmare Zone.”

But Paul Garvey said: “It does pose a problem, though. In that we only have sixty minutes left to Zero Hour …”

Finally the static broke up, E-Branch got through to them, and David Chung’s slightly tinny, worried voice said: “Sunray, this is Echo Hotel Quebec. Signals, over?”

“Echo Hotel Quebec, this is Sunray,” Trask answered. “Signals OK … but let’s junk the radio procedure. We haven’t the time.”

Chung’s sigh of relief was clearly audible, and then his question: “Is everything OK? I’ve been trying to get you for the last hour. I was about ready to send a car over. Most of E-Branch has reported for duty tonight. We’re there with you right now… in mind if not in body.” Chung was one of only a handful of men in the entire world who could say that sort of thing and actually mean it.

“We’ve had a few problems,” Trask said. “But it’s cool now for the moment. You can give us a buzz every ten minutes or so, but
don’t
send the cavalry! And that’s an order. There are more than enough of us in the firing line already.”

“It’s just that Zek wasn’t able to get through to Paul or Nathan,” Chung said. “And I couldn’t locate you, despite that I knew where you were. None of us was getting anything! You were swamped with static. And … naturally, we were worried.”

“Every ten minutes,” Trask repeated. “Meanwhile … well, you can wish us luck.” He broke contact.

Smart wanted to know: “So why has everything suddenly gone quiet now?”

Trask glanced at him, noticed how drawn he was looking. All of them were. And Nathan’s clothes didn’t fit too well. Trask would be willing to bet that Nathan had lost seven or eight pounds in weight. Returning his gaze to Smart he said: “It must have taken a hell of a lot out of John Scofield to put on a show like that. Now he’ll be recuperating, regenerating himself. But that was only the start of it. The finale comes at 12:00
P.M.
”

Paul Garvey’s face was as expressionless as the unfeeling flesh it was made of, as he put in: “And if time narrows down again? What then?”

Trask shrugged, but in no way negligently. “You tell me.”

Nathan finished his coffee, got to his feet, looked at his friends. “I almost got through to them,” he said. “To the teeming dead. I need to speak to Keenan Gormley again, and through him to the Great Majority. Even to John Scofield. Especially to him. But I need privacy, and quiet. And I only have an hour …”

Trask was on his feet at once. “You’ll go back in there?”

Nathan’s turn to shrug. “That’s where it is, Ben. Didn’t you name it yourself? The … what, epicenter? Whatever’s coming, it’s coming out of there. John Scofield is in there. And his wife and son, finally willing to accept what’s happened to them. Even Tod Prentiss, hiding somewhere in there. And all the Great Majority, prepared to talk to me at last. They need me now. And if I’m ever going to get back to Sunside, I need them. So there’s no other way. I have to go back in.”

Trask opened his mouth to make an answer but nothing came out. His eyes went instead to the electric jug in which Smart had boiled water for the coffee. It was no longer plugged in, but the water had started to boil. And Garvey was staring at his watch again. Gape-mouthed, he showed the others: the second hand was sweeping round the dial!

Nathan flew down the steps to the corridor of softly shining tiles, and raced along it to the morgue. He didn’t want to go in but he must. Too much depended on it: the peace and sanity of the living and the dead of two worlds. And behind him as he entered the morgue, the doors slammed shut again.

PRENTISS! John Scofield’s mad, awesome dead-speak voice was back in his mind. TOD
PRENTISSSS!
And Nathan’s hackles rose as he skidded to a halt in the blue-misted room and felt again the telekinetic aura of the dead man, a tangible force in the midnight morgue.

“Not Prentiss,” he answered in a gasp. “My name’s Nathan. Nathan Keogh. Why don’t you listen to the dead, John? They’ll tell you who I am. Why don’t you listen to Sir Keenan Gormley? Before you were a member of E-Branch, he was the head of that organization. He was my father’s friend, and now he’s mine. I know because I can talk to him, even as I’m talking to you. I know because I’m the Necroscope. Would you harm me, John? The only friend you have left in the living world? The son of the man who taught the teeming dead how to speak to one another?”

WHEN I SEEK YOU OUT (Scofield ignored Nathan’s pleading), I FIND YOU—ALWAYS. YOU HIDE FROM ME, KEEP QUIET AND STILL, CLOSE YOUR MIND, BUT I ALWAYS FIND YOU. THIS TIME I’VE FOUND YOU AGAIN, BUT YOU WOULD TRICK ME INTO BELIEVING THAT YOU ARE SOME OTHER, THIS KEOGH. EXCEPT I KNOW YOUR DECEPTION. HOW CAN YOU BE ANY OTHER BUT TOD PRENTISS? I’VE SHUT THE TEEMING DEAD OUT, FOR THEY WOULD ONLY MEDDLE. AND THE ONE VOICE—THE ONE LOATHSOME
BEING
—I SEEK, IS YOU. OF ALL THE GREAT MAJORITY, YOURS IS THE SINGLE VOICE I ALLOW MYSELF TO HEAR. WHEREFORE … I … KNOW …
YOU
… TOD PRENTISSSS!

Cracks zig-zagged across the floor; the room shook with a rumbling rage of its own; the floor fell away beneath Nathan’s feet, leaving him standing on a crumbling jut of tiled masonry as the walls extended themselves downwards, changing from brick and plaster to rough-hewn rock. He teetered this way and that as more tiles and masonry fell away, spinning into the blue-glowing deeps. And down there, far below—red-roaring fire! Its vengeful heat warmed the shaft like a breath of hell.

You have the wrong man, John!
It was Sir Keenan Gormley’s frantic deadspeak voice, homing in on the awesome Centre of Power that was Scofield’s incorporeal mind
. You don’t know me but I know you. I know of you. All
of the teeming dead know you, and if you persist in what you’re doing the living will know of you, too. Indeed, you may even destroy their world!

If Scofield heard him at all, he ignored him. But to Nathan: HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I KILLED YOU? IN HOW MANY WAYS? A GOOD MANY, I KNOW. BUT HAVE I CRUSHED YOU IN A FALL, AND BURNED YOU IN HELL’S OWN FIRES?

More of the tiles fell from the rim of Nathan’s rapidly diminishing refuge, until he knew that the projecting tongue of masonry couldn’t hold him up for very much longer. But was it really possible for Scofield to crush him in an imaginary fall, or turn him to a cinder in imaginary fires?

It was, yes: possible to crush Nathan with the power of his telekinetic mind, and to
move
the fires of inner earth to surround him with their heat, which is such that it will melt steel. Nathan was losing his balance. He slipped, fell, clung to the disintegrating masonry as more debris went tumbling into the mental pit which Scofield had created. But:

John!
(A woman’s deadspeak voice, sighing, soft, tender. But tired, too. So very tired.)
John, come home now. Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, stop it now and come home. We’re … here, John. And we’re not afraid any more. The … the dead have helped us to overcome. They can help you, too. So please come home now. Oh, it’s a strange sort of home, 1 know. But where we are—the three of us together, you, me, Andrew—that’s home …

LYNN…?

Now
Scofield heard. But did he believe? LYNN? His voice gonged as before, but its tone was different: wondering as opposed to furious. And then … a groan! BUT WOULD THEY USE YOU, TOO, TO CONFUSE ME AND DELAY MY JUSTICE? The pain, sorrow and anguish in that voice would be enough for twenty grieving men. ARE YOU … ARE YOU A PART OF IT?

Part
of what, John? There is no plot, my love. But just as Tod Prentiss is in hiding from you, so we’ve been hiding, too—from the truth! And so have you. We’ve been hiding from each other. But now it’s time to come together, John, and it’s also time for you to come home.

Lynn Scofield had been doing all right until she mentioned Prentiss’s name. But that had been a huge mistake. HOME? (The rage was back in her husband’s dead voice.) I SHOULD COME HOME NOW, WHEN I HAVE HIM WHERE I WANT HIM? HE
DESTROYED
MY HOME AS I NOW DESTROY HIM!

The lone fang of rock broke away from the wall with Nathan still clinging to it. Turning end over end, he felt the rush of heated air from the core of volcanic lava below him, and saw the sheer unscalable walls go rushing past. Then …

The
pace
slowed down! He continued to plunge—but—oh—so—slooooowly! He floated, a feather with the weight of a man. And he knew how, why.

It was the teeming dead. If John Scofield could do it, so could they … Their massed minds … The joint effort of a million dead souls, who suddenly knew Nathan for his real value, just as they had known his father in the early days of Harry Keogh’s earthly innocence.

And now they turned their single deadspeak voice on John Scofield, telling him:

John, we’ve found Tod Prentiss for you, driven him out of hiding. And
we’ll give him to you willingly this one last time, in order to prove how wrong you are. But if you let Nathan die, you’ll be damned by the dead forever! You of all men know what a crime it is: to take the life of someone much loved. Kill Tod Prentiss again if you must, but not this man. For Nathan Keogh is the Necroscope, John! He’s the light in what’s left of the “lives” of each and every one of us. Without his father, what would we ever have been? And without him … who can say?

YOU HAVE …
FOUND
TOD PRENTISS? Scofield’s voice was uncertain. THEN SHOW HIM TO ME. GIVE HIM TO ME…

And another voice—terrified, utterly mindless with fear—cried:
No, NO, NOOOOO!!!
The scream of a maniac, yes. Of a trapped, rabid animal. Tod Prentiss’s scream.

Nathan, falling slow as a leaf, yet hurtling to his doom for all that, “saw” the face of Tod Prentiss. As it had been, then in various stages of languid, loathsome corruption, and finally as it was now. He saw it first bloated with evil: red and round, its eyes too small, too close together over a blob of a nose, loose, fleshy lips, and a receding chin. The face of a beast, which leered even without trying. Then he saw the mouth fall open and the leer turn to a look of terror, horror as the flesh began to slough. The lips and cheeks puffing up, bursting and turning to rot; the eyes glazing over, sinking back into sulphur-yellow orbits, dribbling sick grey fluids from red rims; the nose collapsing in upon itself, livid flesh peeling back and a crater of jagged bone showing through. Finally the jaws gaping wide in a dead scream, as maggots erupted from the purple rot and quickly fretted the whole to a skull!

Nathan saw it, and so did John Scofield.

THAT …
IS
TOD PRENTISS! He knew it for a fact. WHICH CAN ONLY MEAN THAT THIS ONE—(suddenly Scofield’s deadspeak voice was shocked, full of the knowledge of its own error)—THAT HE—
IS NATHAN KEOGH!

The floor was back under Nathan’s feet, but he felt that he was still falling. Crumpling to the cold tiles, then hugging to them, he sobbed his exhaustion into the cool air of the morgue—

—And saw that he lay in a pool of blue-glowing mist, and knew that it wasn’t over yet…

VI

Confrontation—

Conclusion—Connections