Necroscope V: Deadspawn

1 The Hunters and the Hunted

Harry Keogh, Necroscope and would-be avenger, had thought at first that it would not be especially difficult to track down his quarry: a young driver working for Frigis Express, who also happened to be a necromancer, sex monster, and the insane serial killer of (to date) six young women. But he'd soon discovered that it wouldn't be nearly as simple as he'd thought. Frigis had a dozen branches up and down the country, with a like number of warehouses and freezer depots, and over two hundred trucks of which fifty per cent were on the roads at any given hour of the day or night. The firm must therefore employ quite a few drivers who would fit the vague description in Harry's possession; (vague, yes, for he suspected that the bloated, lusting creature he'd been shown was more a figure of terrified imagination than of the real man). Also, it seemed likely that Frigis would use casual labour, and it could be that Harry's man was one of these; but somewhere there should be a list of regular employees at least. Harry hoped to find that list, and also that the John or 'Johnny' he was looking for would be on it.

On the third Wednesday in May at 3:30 in the morning, he paid a visit to Frigis's main office in London to have a look at the company's books. He went there via the Möbius Continuum, making several stops at well-known exit points before finally emerging in a shop doorway in Oxford Street. At that hour the normally polluted air was almost wholly free of traffic fumes and even bracing, and the night-lighting loaned the street a certain alien luminosity. Large, lethargically flapping pages from a discarded, dismembered newspaper fluttered like strange slow birds on buffets of blustery air along the gutters.

The offices Harry was looking for were directly opposite; no lights showed within the building; he hoped there'd be no night watchman to complicate matters. And there wasn't.

Entering the building by the Möbius route, Harry let his burgeoning vampire instincts guide him to the correct floor and then to the records office. Locked doors were no trouble at all to the Necroscope, who used numbers to conjure doors of his own out of the thin air. But twice, purely out of habit, he went to switch on lights before realizing that he no longer had need of them; and once he came face to face with a full-length mirror, which both shocked and fascinated him with its picture of a gaunt-faced man with luminous, red-tinged eyes. He had known of course that the change was taking place in him, but only then realized how quickly it was happening. It filled him with mixed emotions and alien longings; it was the night and the mystery, and the going in strange places, as if in search of prey. Well, and so he was. Except there is prey and there is prey…

The records office was dirty and untidy, and smelled of strong coffee and stale cigarette smoke. It had an antiquated system of filing cabinets, all open for Harry's inspection. He quickly turned up a list of branch and depot managers, but no information on rank-and-file employees. There was, however, a list of addresses and telephone numbers of all Frigis Express's subsidiary offices, which Harry pocketed. That should save him a little time, at least. But that was all there was, which was hardly satisfactory.

Disgruntled, Harry pondered over his next move: presumably to start at the top of the list of branches and work down it. But then, out of nowhere, he found himself wondering if maybe Trevor Jordan was up and about. He could use a cup of coffee, a little companionship and friendly conversation, someone… to be with — briefly, anyway — if only to work the weirdness out of his system.

It was unlikely Jordan would be awake, but just on the off chance Harry reached out with his telepathic mind and searched for him — and immediately found him.

Harry? Jordan's unmistakable 'voice' sounded in Harry's mind as clearly as if he'd whispered the words in his ear. Is that you?

Harry found telepathy similar to and yet quite different from deadspeak. He had used something like it before — a sort of reverse deadspeak, he supposed — but that had been quite a few years ago in his incorporeal days and also very different. Telepathy was therefore new to him. Even so, still it struck him as being… more natural? Well, and he supposed it was more natural. For after all, almost anything in the world would be. But telepathy: it was something like a telephone conversation, even down to the hiss and crackle of psychic 'static'; whereas deadspeak was the wind whistling eerily down a bleak desert canyon under a full, floating moon. In short, it was the difference between talking mind-to-mind with living people, and conversing metaphysically with dead ones.

And yet Jordan had seemed wary, unsure of Harry's identity and even unwilling to reveal his own. Just why that should be the Necroscope couldn't guess. He frowned and asked, Who else would it be, Trevor?

And hearing his voice, Jordan knew him at once. But his mind-sigh (of relief?) warned Harry that something was very wrong. Likewise what he said next: Harry, you know my old place in Barnet? That's where I am. But I can't say for how long. I'd like to get out of here. I don't want to explain right now — it mightn't even be safe to — but do you think you could get round here? I mean, like now?

What's the trouble? Harry was switched on now, alert to danger. And he could still sense Jordan's uncertainty.

Harry, I don't know. I came down to London to see if I could maybe find something out for you, but I've been blocked all along the line, almost from the start. I came here to watch them, E-Branch, but hell… I didn't think there'd be anyone watching me/

Right now?

Right now, yes.

I'm on my way, said Harry.

Air made a small implosion into the empty space where he stepped through a Möbius door, its draught causing papers to rustle in a filing cabinet he'd left standing open. But before the papers had stopped rustling Harry had tracked down Jordan's thoughts to Barnet.

He emerged silently into the resurrected telepath's front room, whose first-floor bay windows overlooked a cobbled cul-de-sac, the end wall of a park, and the dark, gently mobile silhouette of trees beyond. The room was in darkness and Jordan was at the window, looking out through a crack in the curtains on a street shining dull yellow in electric lamplight. Harry reached out to a wall switch and put on the light, and Jordan hissed, fell into a crouch and whirled to face him. There was a gun in his hand.

'It's OK,' the Necroscope told him. 'It's just me.'

Jordan drew a deep breath and almost fell into a chair. He waved his hand to indicate Harry should also sit down. 'It's just the way you come and go,' he said.

'You invited me,' Harry reminded him.

Jordan nodded. 'Here I am a bag of nerves, looking out into the street — and then the light going on like that!'

Harry said, 'It wasn't deliberate; or rather, it was. If I had spoken you'd have turned and seen me. I'm not sure which would have shocked you more: the light going on suddenly, or seeing my eyes in the dark.'

'Your eyes?'

Harry grimaced, nodding. 'They're red as hell, Trevor. And there's nothing to stop it now. What's in me is a strong one.'

'But… you still have a little time?'

Harry shrugged. 'I don't know how long. Long enough to do one last thing, I hope, and then I'll be on my way.' He finally sat down. 'Now, would you like to put your gun away and tell me what's on your mind?'

Jordan looked at the gun in his hand as if he'd forgotten it was there. He gave a snort and replaced it in its shoulder holster. 'Nervous as a cat,' he explained. 'Or rather, as a mouse watched by a cat!'

'Are you watched?' Harry didn't know where to aim his thoughts to check. Searching for Jordan had been different, for he'd known what he was looking for; likewise Paxton. But looking for someone he wasn't used to — some unknown someone — was a trick he'd yet to master. 'Are you sure?'

Jordan got up and put out the light, went to the curtains again. 'I've never been so sure. He or they are out there right now, not too far away, scanning me. Or if not scanning, obscuring. They're blocking me. I can't read past them. I keep thinking it can only be E-Branch, but how the hell would they know I was back? Alive, I mean?' He looked back from the curtains, saw Harry's alien face and said, 'I… I see what you mean.'

Harry, a tall, dark silhouette whose eyes made his face a mask from hell, nodded. But there were other things to worry about than the glare of his blood-hued eyes. 'What does it feel like, to have someone watching you, blocking your mind?'

'Being watched is how it felt with Paxton; blocking is mental interference. A screen of static.'

'But I wasn't even sure Paxton was there until you told me. He was just an itch. And as for mental interference…'

'OK.' The other matched Harry's shrug. 'I'll give you an example. Try aiming your thoughts right at me.'

Harry did it and met a buzzing wall of interference. If he hadn't known it was Jordan, then he wouldn't have known what it was. Jordan said, 'Find something like that, and you know someone's scrambling you. Deliberately. I know because I've had practice. When the Russian espers used to cover the Chateau Bronnitsy, it was like this all the time. We used to try and break through, and they were always trying to get through to us.' He looked at Harry again, penetratingly. 'Incidentally, you do it all the time, Harry, except when you're wanting to read someone, or wanting someone to read you. But with you it's different. Something that's permanent and getting stronger all the time. It isn't static but something else, and it comes natural to you. So natural you didn't even know about it, did you? Or maybe "natural" is the wrong word for it. What you have is… well, in E-Branch we used to call it mind-smog.'

The Necroscope nodded. 'I wondered about that. It's a dead giveaway. By now Darcy's espers must know what I am. Or if not he should fire the lot of them! So it looks like the talent Wellesley gave me is going to be redundant… or maybe not.' And after a moment's thought: 'No definitely not. Wellesley's thing is a total blanket: it doesn't just make my mind unreadable but blanks it out entirely. The vampire thing is just mind-smog, like you said. But it makes me wonder: how come Paxton didn't discover what was happening to me earlier? How was he able to get to me at all?'

'It was only just starting then,' Jordan answered. 'Your vampire thing wasn't fully developed. It still isn't, but sufficiently so that it stopped me. I've tried to reach you half a dozen times this last couple of days but was only able to make it when you wanted to contact me. Oh, and something else. You mentioned Darcy Clarke, right? Well — '

Suddenly he paused and held up a cautioning hand. 'Wait!' And in another moment: 'Did you feel that?'

Harry shook his head.

'A probe,' said Jordan. 'Someone trying to get in to me. The moment I relax, they're there.'

Harry stepped toward Jordan and the large, curved windows, but held himself back a little in the shadows. 'You said it was on your mind to get out of here. What did you mean?'

'Only that I don't know what's on their minds,' the other told him. 'I mean, I know it can only be E-Branch out there, but I don't know what they're up to or what they're planning. Do they know it's me? That seems unlikely: what, that I'm back from the dead? But on the other hand, and from their point of view, who else can I be if I'm a telepath using Trevor Jordan's flat? And this watch they're keeping on me: it reminds me of that time we were covering Yulian Bodescu. I mean, who the hell do they think I am, Harry?'

Very slowly, Harry nodded. T begin to understand,' he said. And he gripped Jordan's elbow. 'And you're right: it's exactly like that time they were covering Yulian Bodescu. Which means that it's not so much a case of who they think you are but what they think you are!'

Jordan gasped. 'You mean they think I'm…?'

'It's possible. You're back from the dead, aren't you?'

'But I have no mind-smog.'

'Neither did I, until recently.'

Again Jordan's gasp. 'They're waiting to see how things develop before they move in! Which would explain just about everything. Certainly it would explain why I'm shit-scared of them! I'm picking up something of their suspicions, their intentions. I'm sensing the hunters hot on my track. Harry, they think — they suspect — that I'm a vampire!'

The Necroscope tried to calm him down. 'But you're not, and it's easy to prove that you're not. Also, Darcy Clarke's in charge of E-Branch, and… what were you going to tell me about Darcy, anyway?'

Jordan came away from the window. Another look at Harry's face convinced him the light would be better on. He tripped the switch on the wall, then sat down heavily. 'Darcy's at home,' he said, 'and very unhappy about something. He was the one I was supposed to be watching, remember? Because he's the boss and would know which ways things are jumping. But now he seems to have been taken off the job. And while he isn't a telepath himself, still somebody is throwing up a pretty good shield around him, making it hard to get anything.'

That felt ominous. Harry said, 'Maybe we should go and see him. Maybe we should confront him, ask him straight out what's going on. I'm pretty sure I know already — that the Branch is just waiting for me to put a foot wrong — but if we hear it from Darcy then we'll know it for sure.'

Jordan shrugged. 'At least it would get me out of here. I feel that if I don't get out, then I'll go nuts! God, I don't like being watched and not know what they're thinking.'

'OK,' said Harry. 'And afterwards? Will you come back here or what? The thing is, I could use some help on this serial killer thing. And we can use my place in Bonnyrig as a base. For the time being, anyway. That way we'll be able to spell each other watching out for the watchers. And when this task I've set myself is done, then, before I leave — I mean before I really leave everything — we'll find a way to square it with E-Branch and put your own record straight.'

That all sounds good to me.' Jordan breathed a sigh of relief. 'Just say the word, Harry, and I'm your man.'

The other nodded. 'The word is we go and see Darcy. He's single, isn't he, like most of you espers? I know he used to live in Hoddesdon; is he still there? And will he be on his own, or is there a woman? Darcy isn't likely to buckle under a shock or two, I'm sure, but I don't want to go scaring any women.'

Jordan shook his head. 'No woman that I know of. Darcy's been married to the job too long. But he's not in Hoddesdon any more. He got himself a house in Crouch End, just a mile or two away. A nice place with a garden in Haslemere Road. Only been there a couple of weeks. He moved in right after the Greek job.'

Again Harry's nod. 'I don't know the area but you can show it to me. Is there anything you want to take with you?'

'My suitcase is already packed.'

Then we can go right now.'

'At 4:20 in the morning? If you say so. I don't have a car, though, so we either walk it or I'll need to call a — ' But Jordan knew his mistake at once, as soon as he saw Harry's strange wan smile.

'A taxi's not necessary,' the Necroscope told him. 'I have my own transport…'

Darcy Clarke was still up, pacing the floor as he'd paced it all night. It wasn't his talent that was bothering him — he himself wasn't in any danger — he was just worried about the Branch and the job he suspected was being planned right now, at this very moment. About that, and about Harry Keogh. But in fact the two were one and the same thing.

The ground-floor lights of Clarke's house were bright behind a facade of shrubs and trees as Harry guided Jordan out through a Möbius exit and back into the real world. 'You can open your eyes now,' he told the telepath as Jordan staggered under the briefly suspended, now renewed, pull of gravity. It was like the feeling in the pit of your stomach when an elevator descends to the level you want and jerks to a halt there, except this elevator had no walls, floor or ceiling and you 'fell' in every direction at once. Which was why Harry had asked Jordan to close his eyes a moment.

'My God!' Jordan whispered, swaying a little as he looked all around at the night street.

Harry thought: God? The Möbius Continuum? Well, and you could be right. August Ferdinand thinks so, anyway! He steadied the telepath and said, 'I know. It's a weird sensation, isn't it?'

Jordan looked at Harry and felt himself in awe of him. He talked about the immundane, the utterly unbelievable, as if it were merely odd. But finally Jordan gathered his senses to say, 'Nice shot, Harry. That's Darcy's place right there.'

They let themselves in through the garden gate and walked up a path between the shrubs. The glowing white globe of a lamp drew a cloud of moths where it hung like a small moon over the front door. Harry directed Jordan to stand to one side, put on his dark glasses and pushed the doorbell; in a little while footsteps sounded from within.

The door was equipped with a peephole lens; Clarke used it and saw Harry standing on his doorstep, staring right at him. His talent made no objection as he opened the door, which told him a lot. 'Harry!' he said. 'Come in, come in!'

'Darcy,' Harry said, taking hold of his arm, 'listen, take it easy — but there's someone with me.'

'Someone with — ?' Darcy started to say as Jordan stepped into view. He saw him and said, 'Trevor…?' Then he started violently and took a pace to the rear.

Harry, following him in, said: 'It's OK, it's OK!'

'Trevor!' Clarke breathed, his eyes bulging in his suddenly pale face. 'Trevor Jordan! Oh, my God! Oh, sweet Jesus!'

Harry wished people wouldn't keep using these Names of Power so casually, but on this occasion he understood and made nothing of it.

Trevor Jordan pushed past Harry and took Clarke's other arm; Clarke at once strained back and away from both of them. But again it was a 'normal' reaction, nothing to do with his talent. Jordan said, 'Darcy, it really is me. And I'm OK.'

'OK?' Clarke's mouth open and closed and the word came out like a croak. He tried again. 'Really you? Yes, I can see that. But I know you're dead. I was with you in that Rhodes hospital, remember, when you put a bullet in your brain!'

Harry said, 'Can we go inside, sit down, talk?'

Talk?' Clarke looked at him — at both of them — as if they were mad, or as if he was. But then he nodded. 'Sure, why not? And then I might wake up!'

In the living room Clarke pointed to chairs, poured drinks like a robot, actually apologized for the untidiness and said he wasn't quite settled in yet. And then he very carefully sat down and tossed back his large whisky in one… and at once sprang to his feet again and said, 'So for fuck's sake, talk! Convince me that I haven't cracked!'

Harry calmed him down and very quickly explained everything — or almost everything — but without going into the fine details. And when he was through: 'So we've come to see you to find out what's going on, what it is that you and E-Branch are up to. Actually I'm pretty sure I already know. So I'm counting on you to keep them off my back until I get done with what I'm pledged to do.'

Finally Clarke closed his mouth and turned to stare hard at Jordan. Jordan, yes — looking exactly as Clarke had always known him — but still he took the other's hand and squeezed it, and stared even harder just to be one hundred per cent sure. But in the end there was no way round it; this could only be Trevor Jordan. The telepath suffered Clarke's astonished scrutiny and made no complaint as this old friend of so many years' standing checked him out, checked every well-remembered line of his face and form.

Jordan's face was fresh, oval and open, and with his fair, thinning hair falling forward over grey eyes, it would normally look boyish; except that now it was lined with worry and not a little astonishment of his own. His feelings were reflected in the line of his mouth: naturally crooked, it would tighten and straighten out if something was wrong. Which was how it looked now, straight and tight. Well, and Clarke could well understand that.

And Clarke thought: Good old easy-going Trevor! Transparent as a window, readable as an open book. Such has always been your guise, anyway. As if you'd like people to be able to read you as easily as you read them, like you were trying to compensate for your metaphysical talent, or even apologize for it. Trevor Jordan: sensitive but always determined, I never met the man who didn't like you. And if there was such a one, why, you'd simply avoid him. And if you really are you, you'll know exactly what I'm thinking.

Jordan grinned and said, 'You missed out the handsome, rangy-limbed, athletic bit! But what's this about "boyish"? Are you calling me a big kid, Darcy?'

Clarke sat back in his chair and touched his feverish brow with a trembling hand. He didn't know which one of them to look at, Harry Keogh or Trevor Jordan. Finally he said, 'What can I say? Except… welcome back, Trevor!'

After more drinks, it was Darcy's turn. He told them what he knew, which wasn't much, and finished up: 'So Paxton must have reported how I sent you the files on those girls, Harry, which was sufficient to get me suspended. As for them coming after you: you know how the Branch works almost as well as I do. Of course they'll be coming after you, sooner or later.'

Trevor said, 'And me?'

'No,' Darcy told him, 'because tomorrow first thing, I'll go into town and put them in the picture. I could 'phone the Minister Responsible right now, but at this hour he wouldn't thank me for that. So I'll go in and speak to everyone who is anyone in E-Branch, and make sure they fully understand what's going on. It might do the trick and get them off Harry's back for a while.'

'I hope it gets them off my back,' said the Necroscope, unemotionally. 'I really do.' And he took off his dark-lensed glasses and asked Darcy to dim the lights.

When E-Branch's suspended boss saw Harry's face in the darkened room, he quietly said, 'Harry, I hope so too… for their sake, every last one of them!'

Harry supposed that Darcy was genuine, supposed he was one of only a very few men in the entire world whom he could trust; but the Necroscope's vampire weirdness was strong in him now, and looking at Darcy Clarke he saw a man who was half-friend and half-enemy. Harry couldn't read the future, not with any certainty — and in any case he knew that prognostication was a dangerous game, fraught with paradoxes — but he could make a damn good guess at what was coming. If he had to stay here in this world longer than he'd planned, if this task he'd set himself took longer than just a few more days, then it could well be that Darcy would be obliged to join the other team. Darcy was an expert, and as Harry's metamorphosis progressed the Branch would need all the expert help it could get. Eventually, one way or another, even Darcy would turn against him. He'd have no choice: sooner or later the plague carrier would have to be destroyed. It was as simple as that.

'Darcy,' Harry said, as he turned the lights up again, 'if we ever did come up against one another, why, you'd be just about the only one who could stop me! For which reason I'm half afraid of you. You know I'm a telepath now? Well, I am. And I wonder: would it bother you if I took a closer look into your mind?'

Darcy's talent sensed no danger. Of course not, for Harry intended him no harm. What he did intend was to take out a sort of insurance policy, one which could be cancelled later, when the danger was past. No harm at all to Darcy Clarke the man, only to his talent itself. For that was what the Necroscope feared: to come up against Clarke knowing he couldn't win, that the deflector's guardian angel would protect him. But with his talent taken away from him, Clarke would be impotent. At least for what remained of Harry's term here. Afterwards… he would give it back to him.

'Look into my mind?' Darcy repeated him.

'With your permission,' Harry nodded. 'But it has to be of your own free will.'

Darcy read nothing into the Necroscope's words. 'But can't you read my mind, just like Trevor here?'

This is different,' said Harry. 'For this you need to invite me in, as if your mind was a door which you were opening for me.'

'Anything you say.' Darcy shrugged; and his eyes met the other's and locked on them, and in another moment Harry was into his mind.

The mechanism Harry sought wasn't difficult to find, and he saw at once that it was a freak, a mutation. It was Clarke's unique talent, which all of his life had protected him from external dangers but was impotent to save itself from the internal danger which was Harry Keogh. And even if it could save itself it did nothing, because Harry meant no harm.

There was no trigger Harry could jam, so he simply wrapped the entire mechanism in a fragment of Wellesley's blanket. The job took as long as it takes to tell and then he was out again. And he was satisfied that Clarke's guardian angel had been gagged, for the time being at least.

'Is that it?' Darcy frowned. 'Are you satisfied I'll do you no harm?'

Absolutely, Harry said to himself, while outwardly he merely nodded. Because if you try you'll have no protection, which means I'll at least be able to protect myself.

And then he heard another voice in his head, Jordan's saying: Which means he's no longer protected from anything. Won't you at least tell him what you've done?

No, Harry answered. You know Darcy: he'd become paranoid about his safety in a moment. That was always his paradox, that despite this weird talent of his, still he looked after himself like he was accident-prone or something.

I hope he'll be all right, that's all, said the other.

'Well?' Darcy prompted Harry.

'I'm satisfied you won't go against me,' the Necroscope told him. 'And now we have to be on our way.'

Jordan said, 'It strikes me as likely that the Branch will know we've been here. If you want to stay on their good side, Darcy, you might like to call the Duty Officer and confirm it. Let them see that you're not in collusion with us. And at the same time you might use your good offices to clear me.'

Darcy pulled a wry face. 'Actually, my "offices" aren't looking any too hot right now,' he said. 'But certainly I'll give it a try.' He looked at Harry. 'So where are you two off to now? Or shouldn't I ask?'

'You shouldn't ask — ' Harry answered. ' — but I'll tell you anyway: we're tracking your serial killer. I sort of got hooked up on it. That's the job I want finished before I move on.'

Darcy nodded. 'That way you'll leave a clean sheet behind you, Harry, which is the way it should be. You'll always be the right sort of legend: famous instead of infamous.'

Harry said nothing. Fame, even infamy, didn't concern him. All that mattered was his obsession. What was more, he knew why it had become an obsession. He was being chased off his territory, forced to vacate his very own world, which he had fought for. Not physically driven out — not yet, anyway — but soon. And the vampire, especially one of the Wamphyri, is tenacious and territorial. Frustrated almost beyond endurance, Harry was fighting back. But if he must take it out on someone, then at least let that someone be a fiend in his own right. Namely, the serial killer, the necromancer, the torturer of Penny and those other poor innocents. Even Pamela Trotter, innocent, yes. Compared to him, anyway.

It was time Harry and Trevor Jordan were on their way. They said the usual farewells, very simply, and Harry told Jordan to close his eyes again. Darcy Clarke watched them go and when they were no longer there held out his trembling hand into the space where they'd passed through a Möbius door into nothing.

And that was all he found there.

Nothing…

2 Finding Johnny

In Edinburgh it would soon be dawn, but Harry Keogh knew that things — all sorts of things — were rapidly coming to a head and he wasn't nearly ready to ease off now. Now that he'd started this job his one thought was to get it finished. In darkness or, if needs be, in light.

Early-summer sunlight would be a problem from now on in, but it was more an inconvenience than a threat proper. The sun wouldn't kill him — not yet, anyway — but taken in large doses it would sicken and weaken him. His glasses helped keep its glare out of his eyes; his floppy hat protected his head and face but was a dead giveaway; he must keep his hands in his pockets for long periods, which gave him the slovenly look of a delinquent youth or a Labour politician but was absolutely necessary. Only the British weather, almost invariably mean, was on his side. Trevor Jordan, on the other hand, suffered no such restrictions and could come and go as he pleased; and with Harry's help, go as far as he pleased and instantly.

In the Necroscope's Bonnyrig house they drank coffee (Harry would prefer good red wine but needed a re-supply), and split the list of Frigis Express depots down the middle. They would work through them alphabetically until they found what they were looking for. Jordan would take the day shift with Harry supplying the transport; Harry would do nights with Jordan for lookout. The telepath had asked what was the big deal with this job and Harry had showed him a series of vivid mind-pictures taken from Penny Sanderson and Pamela Trotter, and now Jordan was as eager as he was. There was a monster loose in the world and he had to die.

'There'll be night watchmen on these places, I'm sure,' Jordan said, studying his half of the list, 'but at this hour of the morning they'll be kipping off: asleep in some secret corner. We could do a few depots right now, before the drivers or packers or whatever get in.'

The bloke we're after is a driver,' Harry said. 'He uses the Ml and possibly the Al or A7. Maybe we should start with depots close to those major routes.'

Jordan had been glancing through the files on the murdered girls. Penny's report seemed to interest him greatly. Ignoring what the Necroscope had just said, he asked, 'Harry, did you know Penny's body was found in the gardens under the Castle's walls?'

Harry frowned. 'Yes. Is that significant?'

'It could be,' the other answered. 'There are quite a few small, specialized units housed in the Castle. For all we know our man from Frigis delivered meat to the various messes and cookhouses that night, and when the coast was clear he bundled Penny over the wall.'

Harry nodded. 'I'll check out the exact spot where she was found. I remember looking over the wall. There are places where it rears over grassy ledges and steep banks, where the drop is only a few feet and if she fell — or was tossed — her body might slip and slither a bit without breaking anything or suffering any real damage. Because apart from the damage and suffering he had caused her, she wasn't in bad shape.' His gaunt face had turned angry as he remembered Penny as she had been the first time he saw her. Shaking his head to dismiss the memory, he growled. 'Anyway, I'll look at it. If it seems at all likely or even possible… well, it could be you've narrowed down the field a little. Thanks, Trevor.' And then, ruefully: 'As you can see, I'd never have made the grade as a detective, or even a common or garden policeman!'

'Listen,' Jordan told him. 'You drop me off in Edinburgh right now and let me follow it up. Let's face it, you've been seen up in the Castle. People may remember you. But they don't know me. I'll take this file with me. I still have an old E-Branch identity card I picked up fromthe flat. It's as good as a policeman's uniform for getting me into places to gather information. Then, while I concentrate on this end of the job, you can get on with checking out the list of depots.'

Harry saw the sense of it. 'All right,' he said. 'And we'll meet back here tonight. Meanwhile, we can easily contact each other if anything breaks. But you have to understand that the sun hampers me. It might stop me getting through to you or you to me. On the other hand, if the day is dull everything will be OK. The only thing is…' He paused uncertainly.

'Yes?' Jordan waited.

'You'll be on your own,' the Necroscope continued. 'If the Branch decides to move on me, they'll be picking my friends up, too.'

'But picking them up' Jordan repeated him. 'Not picking them off! And anyway, Darcy said he'd take care of that.'

Harry nodded. 'But he can't take care of the fact that I'm a vampire. And you know the Branch won't be taking any chances, Trevor. In fact I'd lay you odds that my warrant has already been issued, and that right now they're busy closing off any boltholes. For now… they'll probably lay off this place, because it's mine and I know it better than they do. But sooner or later even this house of mine won't be safe. Hell, it would be the perfect place to settle with me! Out of the way, alone and lonely.'

'Morbid's not the way to go, Harry,' the other told him. 'Let's for now just try to find this Johnny, right? Plenty of time then to sort the rest of it.' And the Necroscope knew he was right. All except the plenty of time part…

The following morning, the Minister Responsible called Darcy Clarke in to E-Branch HQ. When Clarke walked into what had once been his office, the Minister was seated at his old desk… and Geoffrey Paxton was standing in one corner of the room, arms folded across his chest and with his back to the reinforced glass windows. Clarke could do without Paxton picking at his mind, but he was no longer in a position to complain about it.

After apparently casual nods of greeting or acknowledgement, the Minister remarked how ragged Clarke looked; to which he replied, 'I was up late. In fact I'd just managed to snatch an hour or two when your office called to arrange this meeting. Well, that was good, for I was coming in anyway. You see, last night I had a couple of visitors. Except I'm afraid you're not much likely to believe me when I tell you who one of them was.'

Paxton spoke up at once. 'We know who they were, Clarke,' he said, sourly. 'Harry Keogh and Trevor Jordan — vampires!'

Clarke had been ready for that. He sighed and turned to the Minister. 'Do we have to have this meathead in on this? I mean, if he must forever be wriggling about like a fucking great maggot in people's heads, can't it be from a distance? Say, right outside the door here?'

Unruffled, the Minister stared right back at him. 'Are you saying that Paxton is wrong, Clarke?'

Clarke sighed again. 'I saw Harry and Trevor last night, yes. He's right that far.'

'So you're saying that Harry Keogh and Jordan aren't vampires?' The Minister's voice was very quiet.

Clarke looked at him, looked away, chewed his bottom lip. And the Minister prompted him: 'They are vampires?'

Clarke faced him again and said, 'Jordan… isn't.'

'But Keogh is?'

Clarke snapped, 'But you were already pretty sure of that, right? All thanks to — ' he glanced fire at Paxton '- to this slimy shit! Yes, Harry's been contaminated. He picked up this bloody thing protecting us — every single one of us — doing a job out in the Greek islands which I had asked him to help us with. So that in my book at least he's not about to turn killer now! What more can I tell you?'

'We think quite a lot,' Paxton answered, but softly now, his pasty face reddening from the sting of Clarke's insult.

Clarke looked at him, looked at the Minister, and felt no rapport. He wasn't getting through to them at all. 'Why don't you let me tell it my way?' he pleaded. 'And why don't you try listening to me? Who knows, you may even learn something?'

But Paxton said, 'Yes, and we might get thrown right off the track, too.'

Clarke glared at him, looked at the Minister across his desk and said, 'Look, your pet parrot here isn't making much sense. Shit, I don't understand a word! Do you know what he's raving about?'

The Minister came to a decision, gave an abrupt nod and said, 'Clarke, I'm going to give it to you straight. E-Branch was monitoring your place last night. Yours and Jordan's both. You see, we knew even before you did that Jordan was back from the dead, which is to say undead. What? A man dead and gone, yet up and about among the living? Undead! That's how we see it, the only way we can see it. And not only Jordan but one of those murdered girls, too. Vampires, for there's nothing else they can be.'

Clarke cut in desperately, 'But if you'll only listen to me — '

But the Minister wasn't listening. 'We know what time Keogh got to Jordan's flat, the time they left it together and where they went, and the fact that however much we don't know — and even if you hadn't admitted as much — still we'd be absolutely sure that Harry Keogh is a vampire! How can we be so sure? Because he carries all the stigmata. You could say he even smells of vampire: which is to say he covers himself in mind-smog. Do you follow me so far?'

'Of course I do,' Clarke answered, feeling his desperation increasing by leaps and bounds, knowing that the Minister was building a case, but what sort of case? Against whom? He had to take one last stab at getting through to him. 'But can't you see that even in this you're wrong? With all due respect, you don't know anything about vampires. You've had no experience of them. You're not even talented. You only know what you've read or heard from others. And hearsay can't make up for experience. See, this mind-smog you're talking about is something Harry can't control. He doesn't "cover himself" with it, it just is. It's a result of what he is. Like a dog has a tail, Harry has mind-smog. It isn't deliberate. In fact if he could get rid of it he would, for it's a dead giveaway!'

The Minister looked questioningly at Paxton, who nodded however grudgingly. Or perhaps it wasn't so much a grudging nod as a grim one. A nod of affirmation? And even as his apprehension went up another notch, so Clarke said, 'So you see how easy it is to make mistakes?'

Unblinking, unwavering, the Minister said, 'All vampires have this mind-smog, right?'

Clarke did blink, however, as his nerves started to jump. There was nothing to fear here, for his talent would warn him of it, but still his nerves were jumping. 'As far as we know, yes,' he answered. 'All of them that we've dealt with, anyway. When a telepath tries to scan a vampire, he gets mind-smog.'

'Darcy Clarke.' The Minister's face was white now. 'It must have taken a lot of nerve to come here. Either that or you're a madman, or you really don't know what's happened to you.'

'Happened to me?' Clarke could feel the tension building and didn't know what it was about. 'What the hell are you talking — ?'

'You have mind-smog!' Paxton spat the words out.

Clarke's jaw dropped. "What? I have…?'

The Minister raised his voice. 'You out there, Miss Cleary, and Ben. You can come in now.'

The door opened and Millicent Cleary stepped inside, with Ben Trask right behind her. The girl looked at Clarke and her voice was breathless as she said, 'It's true, sir. You… you have it.' She had always called Clarke sir. He looked at her, backed away a step and shook his head.

But Ben Trask said, 'Darcy, she's telling the truth. Even Paxton is telling the truth.'

Clarke took two hesitant steps towards him… and Trask narrowed his eyes, backed off and held up his arms to ward him off! Clarke saw the look in his old friend's eyes and couldn't believe it. 'Ben, it's me!' he said. 'I mean, with your talent you have to know that I'm telling the truth, too!'

'Darcy,' Trask answered, still backing away, 'you've been got at. It's the only answer.'

'Got at?'

'Without your knowing it. You believe you're telling the truth, and on your own that would be enough to throw me. But it's two to one, Darcy. And you have been pretty close to Harry Keogh.'

Clarke spun on his heel, looked at the faces surrounding him. The Minister, white as chalk behind his desk. Paxton, grim-faced, his right hand nervously playing with the lapel of his jacket. Trask, whose talent had never once let him down — until now. And Millicent Cleary, still respectful for all that she'd just accused him of being a monster!

'Crazy, every damned one of you!' Clarke shakily husked. He thrust his left hand into his pocket, brought out his Branch ID and tossed it on to the desk. That's it; I'm through with all of this; finished with the Branch for good. I'm walking.' He reached with his right hand inside his jacket and dragged his issue 9mm pistol into view -

— And Paxton yelled, 'Freeze!' and aimed the gun which he had produced a moment earlier.

Astonished, Clarke turned towards him — turned his empty gun towards him, too — and Paxton squeezed off two shots.

Simultaneous with the deafening reports, Millicent Cleary and Ben Trask yelled, 'No!'

Too late, for Clarke had been hurled halfway across the room by the first bullet, then swatted from his feet and tossed against the wall by the second. His gun went flying as he crumpled to his knees against the bloodied wall, and his hand crept tremblingly to an area over his heart. There were two holes in his jacket, both turning red and dripping through his twitching fingers. 'Shit!' he whispered. And: 'What — ?'

He fell forward on to his face, rolled over on to his side, and Trask and the Cleary girl went to their knees beside him. The Minister was on his feet, aghast, holding on to the edge of the desk to keep from falling; and Paxton had come forward, his gun still at the ready, face pale as a sheet of paper with holes punched out for eyes and mouth. 'He had a gun.' He gasped the words out. 'He was going to use his gun!'

The Minister said, 'I… I thought he was trying to hand it in. That's what it looked like to me.'

Ben Trask cradled Clarke's head, moaning, 'Jesus, Darcy! Jesus!' The girl had unbuttoned Clarke's jacket, torn open his crimson shirt. But the blood had almost stopped pumping.

Clarke looked down disbelievingly at his chest and the red life leaking out of him. 'Not… not possible!' he said. And the fact was that yesterday it wouldn't have been.

'Darcy, Darcy!' Trask said again.

'Not possible!' Clarke murmured for the last time, before his eyes filmed over and his head lolled into Trask's lap. And as yet, no one had even called for a doctor or an ambulance.

For long seconds the tableau held… until Paxton broke the silence with, 'Get away from him! Are you crazy? Get away from him!'

Trask and the girl looked at him.

'His blood,' Paxton told them. 'You have his blood all over you! He'll contaminate you!'

Trask stood up and the horror slowly cleared from his eyes. The horror of what had happened, anyway. But his horror of Paxton was something else. 'Darcy will contaminate…?' He started to repeat Paxton, and took a long loping pace towards him. 'His blood will contaminate us?'

'What the hell's wrong with you?' Paxton backed off.

'Darcy was right,' Trask snarled. 'About you.' He pointed at the Minister Responsible. 'And you.' And he took another pace after Paxton.

'Back off!' Paxton warned him, waving his gun.

Trask caught his wrist and twisted it, and his strength was furious. The gun went clattering to the floor. 'He never spoke a truer word,' Trask said, holding Paxton at arm's length like a piece of stinking, rotten meat. 'You don't know anything about vampires except what you've read or been told. You have no experience of them. If you did you'd know that bullets don't stop them — not for long, anyway! But poor Darcy there, if you have any talent at all you'll know that he's stone dead. And you killed him!'

'I… I…' Paxton struggled but he couldn't free himself from Trask's grip.

'Contaminate?' Trask grated through clenched teeth. He drew Paxton close and rubbed Clarke's blood into his hair, his eyes and nostrils. 'You piece of shit, what could contaminate you?' He drew back a ham of a hand and bunched it into a fist, and -

Trask!' the Minister snapped. 'Ben! Let Paxton go! Let it be! What's done is done. An accident, maybe. A mistake, possibly. But it's done. And it's only one of several things we're not going to like doing.'

Trask's fist hung in mid-air, shaking with its need to crash into Paxton's face. But as the Minister's words sank in, so he tossed the telepath away from him. And lurchingly, almost drunkenly, he went back to Clarke's crumpled, lifeless body.

The Minister said to Paxton, 'Get a doctor… and an ambulance.' Then he saw the look on Paxton's face.

The telepath had recovered both his wits and his nerve; he was cleaning his face with a large pocket handkerchief and shaking his head. His look said, think what you're saying, what you're doing. And out loud he said, 'We don't need a doctor or an ambulance, just an incinerator. Clarke's for burning, by us, right now. Right or wrong, we can't take any chances with him. He's for the fire just as soon as possible. And me, I'm for bathing. Trask, Cleary, I know how you must feel, but if I were you — '

'No, you don't know how we feel.' Ben Trask looked up at him, all emotion gone now from his face.

'Anyway,' Paxton continued, 'I'd bathe if I were you. And right now.'

The Minister indicated the door. 'Go on, then,' he told Paxton. 'Go and arrange… disposal. Do it now — and take a shower, too, if you feel it's necessary — then report back to me.'

And after the telepath had left the room, past the gaping espers where they crowded the corridor: 'Ben,' said the Minister, 'the killing has started. Right or wrong, like Paxton said, it's started. And we both know it has to go on. So from now on I want you in charge of this thing. I want you to run the entire show, until it's sorted out one way or the other.'

Trask stood up, leaned against the wall, looked at the Minister and thought: One way or the other? No, it can only be one way, for the other is unthinkable. Well, someone has to do it, and I'm as experienced as any of them. More than most. And at least if I'm running it I'll know that that idiot Paxton won't be doing any more damage.

In the old days it would have been Darcy, Ken Layard, Trevor Jordan and a handful of others. And Harry, of course. But this time they'd be hunting Harry himself, and that was different. And despite what Clarke had said, it looked as if they'd be hunting Jordan, too. And the girl, Penny Sanderson? Jesus, according to the file she was just a kid! But an undead kid.

'All right?' said the Minister.

And Trask sighed and answered with an almost imperceptible nod. Yes, it was all right. And Paxton could well have been right, too. If there had been something — anything at all — wrong with Darcy…

Trask looked at the girl, her bloodied hands and blouse. 'Shower,' he said, simply. 'And make a good job of it.' Then, when he and the Minister were alone, he said, 'When Darcy's been… burned, we have to scatter the ashes. Scatter them far and wide.' He gave a small shudder. 'For the fact is, Harry Keogh does things with ashes. And I really don't think I ever want to see Darcy again. Not on his feet, anyway.'

9:40 a.m.

Harry Keogh had just finished examining the personnel files at Frigis Express's Darlington depot when three things happened simultaneously. One: the depot clerk, whom Harry had lured from his tiny box of an office with a bogus telephone call, returned unexpectedly. Two: Harry felt a pang — almost a pain — of a sort he'd never experienced before, within his chest, as if someone had doused his heart with ice water. And three: the fading echo of an unrecognized cry bounced off his mind to ricochet into an unreachable metaphysical limbo of its own. And it seemed to the Necroscope that whatever its source, it was intended specifically for him: as if his name had been called from the gulf between life and death.

Deadspeak? But this had been different. Telepathy? Well, maybe. Or a cross between the two? That seemed more likely, and Harry remembered how his mother had described the feelings in her incorporeal heart when a pup called Paddy had been killed by a car on a Bonnyrig road.

So… had someone died? But who? And why had he cried out to Harry?

'Who the fuck are you?' demanded the burly, short-sleeved, red-headed clerk, as he herded Harry into the shadows of a dusty corner where the metal filing cabinet met the wall. He gaped at the former contents of the cabinet, now spilling across the floor.

Harry barely glanced at the man's suspicious, mottled face and said, 'Shh!'

'Shh!?' the other repeated him, disbelievingly. 'You'll get shh! breaking in here! Now what's the score?'

Harry was trying desperately to hang on to the diminishing ethereal echo of… a cry for help? Was that what it had been? 'Look,' he told the very untypical clerk, 'be quiet a minute, will you?' He tried to push by him.

'Why you — !' Blotches of angry red appeared on the man's jowly cheeks. 'A conman and thief, right? I recognize your voice. It was you on the 'phone — right. Well, you picked the wrong man this time, thief!' He grabbed Harry by the lapels and looked as if he was going to butt him in the face.

The Necroscope continued to concentrate on the cry, and at the same time reached out and caught his assailant by the throat. With one huge hand he held him at bay, choking, and with the other he reached up and took off his dark spectacles. The clerk saw his eyes and choked all the more, and commenced windmilling his arms as Harry shoved him effortlessly backwards, driving him across the floor. Finally the clerk's legs hit the edge of his desk and he sat down in a plastic paper tray, shattering it with his fat backside.

Still Harry held him, and still he listened for a repeat performance of the cry. But it was gone now, probably disappeared for ever.

Harry felt anger expanding inside him — felt frustrated, cheated — and his hand on the clerk's windpipe was like iron. His nails bit into the man's flesh as if it were putty, and Harry knew that if he wanted to he could crush his Adam's apple and tear his throat out all in one. What's more, the thing inside was urging him to do it, do it!

But he didn't. Instead he swept the clerk from the desk top and set him crashing down among the debris of his shattering chair and a wooden waste-paper basket.

'M-my… G-God!' The clerk coughed and spat and massaged his throat, and crawled dazedly into a corner where he turned and looked back fearfully at the spot where the blood-eyed, fanged, furious stranger had been standing. But of course the Necroscope was no longer there. No one was there.

And again the clerk gurgled, 'My God! My g-good G-God!'

Working from his list, alphabetically, Harry had already investigated three Frigis depots and installations: the vehicle depot at Alnwick, the slaughterhouse and meat dressing station in Bishop Auckland, and lastly the freezer complex in Darlington. So far he had copied the addresses of four possibles, all of them 'Johns' or 'Johnnies' and all drivers for the firm. Now, however, with the morning only halfway through, the weird mind-cry out of nowhere had disturbed him, damaged his resolve and destroyed his concentration; to such an extent that he took the Möbius route home to Bonnyrig, and from there contacted Trevor Jordan at the Castle on the Mount in Edinburgh.

Harry? Jordan came back at once, his telepathic 'voice' full of his relief that the Necroscope was in touch again. I tried to reach you but your mind-smog was too dense, and getting thicker all the time. Can you come and get me? I think I may have a lead.

Harry nodded, just as if he was speaking to someone directly in front of him and not ten miles away, and said, Do you know the Laird's Larder? It's a coffee shop up there just off the Royal Mile. Ask anyone and they'll direct you. I'll be there in five minutes. But Trevor, tell me: has anything peculiar happened? Have you felt anything strange? Do I need to be, well, more than usually careful how I move?

Watchers, you mean? The Branch? (A mental shake of the other's head). Not that I've detected. Maybe a tentative touch now and then, but nothing you could nail down.

Nothing concentrated anyway. If they have people up here, then they're too good for me. And I'm pretty damn good!

No static? Paxton, maybe?

I don't feel any static. Distantly, maybe, but nothing local. As for Paxton: I'm sure I'd be able to pick him up twenty miles away. And you?

Just an… experience, Harry answered. In Darlington.

Darlington? (The Necroscope could almost see the other's eyebrows going up.) Now there's a coincidence! And did you find any Johnnies in Darlington?

Harry was intrigued. Two, he replied. And one of them a real-life 'Johnny'. That's how he spells his name, anyway: Johnny Courtney. The other is called John Found.

And now he pictured Jordan's grim nod as the telepath said: Yes, and Dragosani was a foundling, too, wasn't he?

Harry said, Is that supposed to mean something? He knew it was.

Better believe it! Jordan confirmed.

See you outside the Laird's Larder, Harry told him. Five minutes…

He waited out the five minutes in a fever of anticipation, then made it six to be sure Jordan had got there, and finally Möbius-tripped to the steep, cobbled road just off the Royal Mile. He emerged from the Continuum on a crowded, bustling pavement where tourists and locals alike were clustered like bees in a hive, jostling and filled with purpose as they went about their various businesses. No one noticed that Harry was suddenly there; people loomed everywhere, from every direction, side-stepping each other; the Necroscope was just another face in the crowd.

Jordan was in the doorway of the Laird's Larder. He spotted Harry, grabbed his elbow and guided him off the street into the shade. Harry was glad of that, for the sun was out and it had grown to be more than a mere irrritation. He now actively hated it. 'Buy three sandwiches,' he told the telepath. 'Steak for me and rare as they've got it, whatever you like for yourself, and anything with plenty of bread around it for the third. OK?'

Mystified, Jordan nodded and went to the busy counter. He ordered, was served, and came back to Harry where he waited. Harry took his arm, said, 'Close your eyes,' and ushered him through a Möbius door. To anyone watching it would look as if they just stepped out of the coffee shop into the street. Except they didn't arrive in the street. Instead, a moment later, they emerged two miles away by the lake on the crest of the vast volcanic outcrop called Arthur's Seat. There was an empty bench where they sat down and ate a while in silence, and Harry tore up the third sandwich into small pieces which he fed to the ducks and a lone swan that came paddling to the feast.

And eventually the Necroscope said, 'Tell me about it.' But Jordan answered, 'You first. What's all this about an "experience" in Darlington? You sounded like something had worried you, Harry. Something other than finding a couple of suspect Johnnies, that is. I mean, tracking this maniac down is important — no one would deny that — but there's such a thing as personal safety, too. So you'd better tell me, are there going to be problems?'

'Oh, yes,' Harry answered. 'And soon. Something inside tells me that not even Darcy Clarke can do anything about that. But that's not what this was about.' And as best he could he explained what he had felt, and told Jordan how his mother had reacted to the death of a small dog.

'You think someone died this morning? Any idea who?' Harry shook his head. 'Someone cried out to me, that's all. I think so, anyway.'

'And your deadspeak? Can't you… make inquiries?'

Harry gave a wry snort. 'The Great Majority don't want to know me,' he answered. 'Not now. Not any longer. I can't say I blame them.' He shrugged, then brightened a little. 'On the other hand, if someone did die and still wants to contact me, then pretty soon he'll be able to do just that.'

'Oh?'

'Through deadspeak,' Harry explained. 'Except he'll have to contact me in person, for I wouldn't know where to start looking. And it will have to be by night. During the daylight hours the sun interferes too much. If not for this hat of mine I'd be in trouble. Even with the hat I feel tired, sick, unable to think straight. There were a few clouds earlier but they're clearing. And the brighter it gets the duller I get!' He stood up and threw the last handful of crumbs on to the surface of the lake between the crags. 'Let's get out of here. I could use some shade.'

They took the Möbius route to the gloomy old house on the outskirts of Bonnyrig, then telepathically probed the countryside all around. 'Nothing,' Jordan declared, and Harry agreed.

And finally: 'All right.' The Necroscope threw off his hat and sprawled gratefully in an easy chair. 'Now it's your turn. Just what did you discover up there at the Castle? I can tell that something's excited you.'

'You're right.' Jordan grinned. 'It was my chance to pay you back, Harry, for what you've done for me. For my life, my resurrection. My God, I'm alive, and I know how wonderful it is! So I wanted things to work out. You could say I almost willed it to happen, and it did.'

'You think you've found our man, or monster?' Harry leaned forward eagerly in his chair.

'I'm pretty sure I have,' the telepath answered. 'Yes, I'm pretty damn sure!'

3 Johnny… Found

'I showed my E-Branch ID at the guardroom.' Jordan commenced his story. 'And told them I was investigating the death of the girl who was found under the walls. I said we'd had our wires crossed the first time, because she wasn't who we'd thought she was, which was why we were looking into it again from square one.

The squaddies on duty had read all about it in the newspapers, and anyway I wasn't the first investigator they'd seen. Not even the first today. They told me that in fact there were already two plain-clothes men in the castle, down in the sergeants' mess. That piece of information stopped me dead for a second or two while I considered it, but then I thought what the hell? For after all, I was E-Branch… wasn't I? Well, I had been until very recently. Anyway, I never had any problem dealing with the law. In fact the police had always shown me, and E-Branch in general, a lot of respect. And vice versa.

'So I asked directions to the Warrant Officers' and Sergeants' mess and made my way there.

'Edinburgh Castle is a massive place, the greater part of which is never even glimpsed by the tourists and general public. Your average tourist knows that the Castle Esplanade is where they hold the Edinburgh Tattoo — with room to build a stadium of eight thousand seats, royal boxes and all, and a hard-standing that takes the military's massed bands, motorcycle and other vehicular displays, shows from all around the world, you name it — but the vast stone complex beyond Mons Meg, the One O'Clock Gun, and Ye Olde Tea Shoppe (or whatever it is they've named that cafe in the crag) remains a mystery to most people. And where the way is roped off, that's where the real Castle begins. But you've been there, Harry, and know what it's like: a maze of alleys and gantlets and courtyards… a fantastic place! And one that's easy to lose your way in.

'Eventually I found the Sergeants' mess and the two Jock plain-clothes officers, who were talking to a Sergeant Cook and his civilian assistants and jotting down a few notes. I showed my ID and asked if I could sit in on their questioning, and they didn't bat an eyelid between them. They knew how the Branch — in the shape of Darcy Clarke and yourself, Harry — had been helping out with the job.

'Anyway, I'd arrived right on cue, because they were asking about the night of the murder, especially about the deliveries of refrigerated meat which had been made to the cookhouse that night. Apparently forensic had alerted them to beast blood on Penny's clothes, do you see?

'Well, you can imagine how it felt, Harry, to be right there when the Cook Sergeant got out his register of deliveries to check details of the beast carcases that had come in… yes, from Frigis Express! Naturally, I said nothing, just kept my ears wide open and my mouth tight shut, and took in as much as I could get. Which was quite a bit; because this overweight, red-faced, hot-and-bothered sergeants' mess cook was efficient to a fault. He not only kept a record of dates and times of all deliveries of foodstuffs — and copies of his own countersigned receipts, which bore the signatures of his suppliers — but he even had the registration numbers of delivery vehicles, too! And naturally I made a mental note of the number of the truck which had made the deliveries that night.

'This is how the delivery system works:

During the day the esplanade gets crowded, and anyway, Edinburgh's streets are no place for big articulated trucks during daylight hours. So Frigis Express delivers at night. Of course, big vehicles can't make it under the arch of the guardroom and up the narrow gantlet, so they park down on the esplanade and the cookhouse sends down a driver in a military Landrover to collect the carcasses. The Frigis driver passes the meat straight out from the back of his truck into the back of the Landrover, which then conveys it up to the main cookhouse. And the Frigis driver goes up as a passenger in the Landrover to get his docket signed. And sometimes he'll have a beer with the Cook Sergeant in his little office, before walking back down to his truck on the dark esplanade. By night, of course, the esplanade is empty and he has plenty of room to turn the big vehicle round and get out of there.

'So… the plain-clothes officers wanted to know if this had been the routine on the night of the murder, and it had. In fact the Cook Sergeant knew this delivery man quite well; he worked for Frigis out of Darlington (yes, Darlington, Harry) and made deliveries to the Castle every three or four weeks. And when the sergeant was around they'd usually have a pint together in his office.

'As for his name: well, his signature was a scrawl, quite unreadable, possibly even disguised… all except for the "F" which started his surname. But the fat sergeant was willing to swear that he referred to himself as — that's right — "Johnny"!

'Well, that was about it. When the officers were satisfied with what they'd got I came out with them. Along the way I made mention of how they seemed to be doing OK without E-Branch on this one. It was pretty obvious they weren't exactly sure what the Branch is all about — hell, who is, except Branch members? — but that they guessed we were some sort of higher echelon intelligence organization which "fools about", however successfully, with psychic stuff: table-rapping and divining and such. And I suppose in a way they were right at that.

Then we spent a little time looking over the wall in various places and down on the gardens towards Princes Street, and sure enough there are places you could dump a body without breaking its bones. The Jocks seemed especially interested in looking down on one spot, and I guessed that's where Penny had been found. A peep inside their minds told me I was right.

'Finally, as I parted company with them on the esplanade, I said, "We'll be in touch, and if this Johnny bloke doesn't work out the way you — "

'But one of them broke in on me: "Oh, we're pretty sure he's the one. And we can wait a few days longer. Actually, we'd like to catch this bastard in the act of picking up some girl before we move on him. He's been doing these jobs of his thick and fast, so we think he'll maybe try it on again the next time out. Another day or two at most. And you'd better believe we'll be right behind him…" Then he shrugged and let it go at that.

'So I told them good luck, and that was it. I felt great — great to be alive, and even better that I'd made a dent in the case — and so had a beer on the Royal Mile. Following which I just waited around for you to contact me. End of story…'

The Necroscope seemed a little disappointed. 'You didn't get a general description of this man, or discover when he's driving for Frigis again?'

These things weren't in their thoughts,' Jordan answered, shaking his head. 'And anyway, if I'd had to concentrate on scanning their minds I might have slipped up, done something stupid, given myself away. Remember, you and I are both telepaths. When we read each other and it comes over strong and true, that's because we're doing it deliberately. But reading the mind of an ordinary person is different. They're cluttered things, minds, and rarely concentrate on anything for more than a moment or two.'

Harry nodded. 'I didn't mean to put you down. What you've done is wonderful. It's worked out perfectly — so far. But now I want to find out something about this man's background, like why he's the way he is. Such knowledge might be of use, that's all. If not to me, to E-Branch after I've gone. Also, I'm curious about his name. You said something about Dragosani also being a foundling? Well, maybe there's more to that than you thought or intended. So… I have one or two things to learn about this Johnny Found. And, of course, I want to get to him before the police. He'd be charged with murder, I know, but what he's done and would still do is worth a lot more than that. He came on very cruel. And that's how he should go out.' The Necroscope's voice as he finished speaking was a deep growl, sinking deeper all the time. Jordan was happy to keep out of his mind, but he couldn't help thinking to himself: Mr Johnny Found — who or whatever, or why ever you are — I wouldn't be in your shoes for all the gold in Fort Knox!

Ben Trask had called his briefing for 2:00 p.m. and all available E-Branch operatives were present. The Minister Responsible was there, too, accompanied by Geoffrey Paxton, whom Trask really hadn't expected to see. But he made no fuss about it; it had dawned on him that the job was too important to let personalities interfere. It just struck him as incongruous that while a low-life specimen such as Paxton was safe and legitimate, the good stuff such as Harry Keogh had crashed foul of fate and was about to become a victim of his own methods. Sure, for it had been Harry who showed the Branch how to do this sort of thing. How to set it up, what weapons to use — the stake, the sword, the fire — and how to strike. In order to kill vampires.

When everyone was present Trask wasted no time but got right down to it. 'By now all of you know what Harry Keogh has become,' he began. 'Which is to say, he's the most dangerous creature who ever lived… partly because he carries this plague of vampirism, which could consume all of us and for which there's no cure. Well, there have been others before Harry and they all succumbed — usually to the Necroscope himself! And that's the rest of what makes him so dangerous: he knows all about it, about us, about… just about everything. Now don't get me wrong: he isn't a superman and never has been, but he is the next best thing. Which was great when he was on our side but isn't quite so hot right now. Oh, yes, and unlike the other vampires the Branch has dealt with, Harry will know we're after him.'

He let that sink in, then continued: 'Some other things that make him dangerous. He's become a telepath, so from now on all you thought-thieves keep a close watch on your minds. If not, Harry will be in there. And if he knows what we're doing as we're doing it, then he won't be waiting around for it to happen, right? He's a teleport, too, and uses something called the Möbius Continuum to come and go as he pleases. He can be literally anywhere he wants to be, instantaneously! Think about that…

'Last but not least — that we know of, anyway — Harry is now a necromancer no less than Dragosani was; no, more than Dragosani was. Because Dragosani only examined his victims. Harry on the other hand can bring them back from the dead, even from their ashes — as vampires, we think. And as such, obviously they'd be working for him. So, what I'm saying is that everything he's previously achieved has now been totally reversed: he is our target! Harry, and anyone who works with him.

'A lot of you will be wondering about Darcy Clarke, so let me put you in the picture. Darcy died… by accident.' Trask at once held up a restraining hand, because he'd seen faces beginning to tighten and mouths opening questioningly. 'It was an accident of sorts,' he repeated, 'and in its way understandable if not entirely acceptable. Now, I've had to do a lot of soul-searching myself in order to come to terms with this, and so I can readily understand your confusion. But Darcy had been changed. He must have been, else we couldn't have killed him. That's right, I said "we", the Branch. If he'd lived he would have been our weakest link, and sooner or later we'd be obliged to deal with him anyway. But he isn't alive and can't be brought back or… interfered with, not where he is now. For we've had him cremated — already, yes — and even now his ashes are being scattered. If he was one of Harry's people, which it has to be said seems likely, then he isn't any more.

'OK, I've said it was an accident. But the real accident — or more properly, the tragedy — was that Darcy Clarke and Harry Keogh were friends, and that they'd had a lot of contact with one another. It's as simple as that. Harry's own "accident" happened to him out in the Greek islands, or more likely in Romania, just a few weeks ago. Since when it's taken him over completely. And conceivably unknown to Darcy — and just conceivably unknown or unrealized even by the Necroscope himself — the thing, disease, contagion, whatever and however you think of it, somehow passed between them. That's the way we see it, anyway.

'But the fact is that Darcy had a very bad case of mind-smog, and he'd lost his guardian angel, the talent which had kept him secure through everything the Branch has thrown at him all these years. As for Darcy working with him or for Harry: well, we knew that he'd been passing information, even before we knew for sure that he'd been changed. Just when these changes occurred isn't easy to tell. They might have been in the wind for some time, but they came to light just last night. For that was when Harry visited Darcy at home. He didn't stay long but after he left… then Darcy had mind-smog.

'So that's what I meant when I said Darcy had been changed. When he died… he just wasn't Darcy Clarke any more, not the one we all knew. And now he isn't anyone. But more importantly, he isn't, and can never be, a threat to the Branch or to the world.

'Harry Keogh very definitely is, however, and so are the people we believe he's already contaminated. There are at least two of these: a young girl called Penny Sanderson, and… the telepath we knew as Trevor Jordan.' Again he held up his hand. 'Yes, I know, Trevor was my friend, too. And hell, he was also dead! But he isn't any more. Harry Keogh has resurrected both of these people from their ashes — which in itself must surely confirm what they've become. Undead!

'So where does all of this leave us? Plainly, it leaves us with a fight on our hands, and one which will take all the skills and efforts of every last one of us. Because if we don't win this one, then there won't be a last one of us! Now here's how we go about it: as of tonight the Sanderson girl goes under covert surveillance. We're going to leave that to Special Branch. No espers to be involved at this stage. Why? Because Harry Keogh or Jordan would pick up on our people like they were radioactive. So it's the dear old British Bobby who covers for us, but without really knowing what it's all about. Just another stakeout as far as they're concerned. Which should be safe enough, for as far as we know the girl's had no contact with Jordan or the Necroscope since Harry… well, since he did whatever he did to bring her back. So we just let the common or garden Law keep an eye on her until it's time, then call them off, and finally move in. By which time we'll know how we're going to deal with her.

'Incidentally, if I seem cold-blooded about this, it's because that's how it has to be. I'm the only one who's left of the old crowd, which means I'm the only one who knows what hell is like. I saw it during the Bodescu case, and out in the Greek islands. Anyone who thinks I'm exaggerating hasn't read the Keogh files or Darcy Clarke's report on the Greek thing. And if any one of you really hasn't read those items, then he bloody well better had, and now!

'OK, so as of tonight we'll have the girl covered, and she'll stay that way until we're all set. But she's small fry and the big fish — the sharks — are still cruising. They're the ones we have to worry about. But how much do we have to worry about them? Let's talk about Jordan.

This morning he was at Edinburgh, in the Castle on the Mount, taking an interest in the serial killer case. Darcy Clarke had asked for the Necroscope's help on this one, and it looks like Harry got hooked on it. Now he and Jordan seem to be working together on it; don't ask me why, except that Penny Sanderson was one of the killer's victims. Revenge? It could well be, for vampires are like that. If so, then sooner or later Harry and Co may be having a go at this sex freak.

'As to how we know Jordan was in the Castle: he just casually latched on to a couple of plain-clothes men during their investigations up there! He was able to do it because he still has his Branch ID. Later, when one of the investigators mentioned Jordan to a superior — the fact that E-Branch still had a man on this thing — his boss got straight on the phone to us saying thanks but no, thanks, they don't need our help any more, they think they've already got their man. Well, at least we managed to obtain the suspect's name and address, which might come in very handy. Apparently he's called John or Johnny Found and has a flat in Darlington. So there'll be some common or garden Law watching Mr Found, too, and I'll be detailing someone to watch them — with a warning to stay well out of the picture, for the moment, unless or until Keogh and Jordan decide to move on him.

'What else about Jordan? Well, as you know, Trevor was — I mean is — a pretty good telepath. It could be that that's where Harry got his new talent. For Harry's also a necromancer, remember? And as such he might be able to accumulate talents as he goes, much as Dragosani did. That's speculation, however, and still to be proven. Another thing about Jordan is this: he was always one hell of a nice bloke. Oh, I know, there's no such thing as a nice vampire. You don't have to tell me that! But what I'm saying is I don't think evil will come naturally to him. It will probably be a gradual process. I hope so, anyway, because of course his vampirism will quickly enhance his already powerful telepathy. Following which… well, put it this way: there won't be any sneaking up on him!

'All right, I'm almost through. You'll all be detailed to your new tasks within the hour, as soon as I can get them worked out. Anything else you're busy with, drop it until you're told otherwise.

'So to sum up on how we're going to work this thing:

'We know that Harry Keogh's favourite haunt — the place he rightly considers his "territory", because it's been his home for most of his life — is an old house near Bonnyrig not far out of Edinburgh. We think he must be working out of there, with Jordan assisting him in whatever he's doing. Probably tracking down Johnny Found, or, if they've already located him, gearing themselves up to bring him to some kind of justice. So as well as watching the Sanderson girl and Mr Found, we're also, obviously, going to keep a covert eye on Harry's old house. But — and I can't stress this too strongly — a very surreptitious eye, right?

'If we can get the girl, Harry and Jordan all at the same time — especially if we can get them on their own, as individuals — that's when we'll move on them. Which might possibly be precipitated if or when Harry and Jordan decide to take out Found. Ideally, we'll wait until we can move on all three of them simultaneously. That way they don't get any warning. What we mustn't do is try to pick them off one by one, which would be to alert the others. Are we straight on that?

'Lastly — or rather before we go on to examine the tools of our trade — I have something to tell you that I know won't go down at all well: namely that the Minister here has confided in Soviet E-Branch on this thing.' Trask stared into the small sea of astonished faces, but no one spoke.

'The point is,' he went on, 'that even if we find a way to trap the Necroscope, which won't be easy, still he'll have a bolthole into a place he could conceivably come back from — bringing God-only-knows what back with him! Yes, I'm talking about the Gate at the Perchorsk Projekt under the Urals. We've kept tabs on that nightmare ever since we found out about it, and we know that the Russians are managing to contain it while they decide on a more satisfactory solution. If we make life intolerable, hopefully impossible, for Harry here, he might just try heading for Starside. So that's why we've confided in the Russians, because we daren't let him go back there. Fine if he wanted to stay there, but monstrous if he ever decided to bring anything back here with him.

'What makes us think he might hide out in another world? A notebook we found an hour ago at Clarke's flat, that's what. Darcy had been jotting down a few thoughts, but that must have been before Harry got to him. It may even be why he got to him. The notes are only a mess of scribble but they make it plain that Darcy thought Harry would skip to Starside. Well, now the Soviets know about Harry, as much as we could tell them, anyway, and they'll be looking out for him. So it looks like the Perchorsk Gate is closed to him.

'OK, so now let's consider our… equipment. And how to use it. Then we'll get round to breaking you all down into balanced teams and doing a preliminary itemization of your tasks.'

Trask removed a blanket from various pieces of equipment laid out on a stout folding table. 'It's important you learn how to use this stuff,' he said. 'The machetes speak for themselves. But be careful with them — they're razor-sharp! As for this: I suppose you all recognize a crossbow when you see one? This third item, however, might not be quite so familiar. It's a lightweight flamethrower, a new model. So I think maybe we'll take a look at that first.

This is the fuel tank, which sits on your back like so…'

And so it went on. The briefing lasted another hour.

Right after sunset Harry made his way to Darlington via the Möbius Continuum. He left Trevor Jordan sleeping (not surprisingly exhausted; his return from Beyond was still like the very strangest dream to him, from which he still feared he might suddenly awaken) in a secret room under the eaves of the house on the river. From the attic room there was a way into the deserted, crumbling old place next door, so that if anything should happen Jordan might use this route to effect something of an escape. But both espers had checked out the psychic 'atmosphere' of the locality and there didn't seem to be anything happening; and in any case Jordan had been busy rationalizing his fears in that respect and really couldn't see E-Branch doing a Yulian Bodescu on him. And in any event, he was satisfied that they wouldn't do anything rash.

Johnny Pound's address in Darlington was the ground-floor flat in an old, four-storeyed, Victorian terrace house on the outer edge of the town centre. The old red bricks had turned black from being too close to the mainline railway; the windows were bleary; three steps led up from a path in the tiny, overgrown front garden to a communal porch. And behind the fagade of that porch — behind the flyspecked, dingy windows, there in those very rooms — that was where Found lived.

In the twilight Harry's skin tingled at the thought and he felt his eager vampire senses intensifying as he walked the street first one way, then the other, past this gloomy street-corner residence of a twentieth-century necromancer. The murderer of sweet young Penny Sanderson.

Simple confrontation would be the easy way, of course, but that wasn't part of the Necroscope's plan. No, for then the result could only be precipitate: the accused would either 'come quietly', in the parlance of the Law, or he would react violently. And Harry would kill him. Which would be far too easy.

Pound's way, on the other hand, his modus operandi, was cruel, creeping, designed to terrify even before the terrible act — the monstrous crime itself — was committed. And Harry was concerned that in his case the punishment should fit the crime. Except… there should be something of a trial, too. But trial as in ordeal, not as in examination as a precursor to judgement. For if Johnny Found was in fact the man, then the sentence had already been passed.

The working day was over; traffic was thinning in the darkening streets; people wended their ways home. And some of them entered the house of the necromancer. A middle-aged woman with a bulging plastic carrier-bag, letting herself in fumblingly through the front door; a young woman with straggly hair and a whining child pulling on her arm, calling out after the woman with the bag to wait for her and hold the door; an older man in coveralls, weary and slump-shouldered, carrying a leather bag of tools.

A light came on in a garret room under steeply sloping eaves. Another winked into being on the second floor, and one on the third. Harry looked away for a moment, up and down the street, then looked back -

— In time to see a fourth, much dimmer light come on in an angled corner window in the ground-floor flat. But he hadn't seen Found go in.

The house stood on a corner; there must be a side-door; Harry waited for the traffic to clear, then crossed to the other side of the road and turned the corner. And there it was: a recessed doorway at the side, Johnny Pound's private access to his lair. And Johnny himself was in there.

Harry crossed the cobbled street away from the house and merged with the shadows of the building on the far side. He turned and leaned back a little against the wall, and looked at the light where it shone out on this side, too, from a tiny window in Pound's ground-floor flat. And he wondered what his quarry was doing in there, what he was thinking… until it dawned on him that he didn't have to just wonder. For Trevor Jordan had given him the power to find out for himself.

He let his vampire-enhanced telepathy flow outwards on the night air, out and away into the dark and across the road, and through the old brickwork into the smoke-grimed, stagnant house of evil. But the probe was aimless, unpractised and lacking authority, spreading out like ripples on a dark pond in all directions. Until suddenly — the Necroscope found more than he'd bargained for!

His telepathy touched upon a mind — no, two minds — and he knew at once that neither one of them belonged to Johnny Found. They weren't in the house, for one thing, and for another… they were already intent upon him! Upon Harry Keogh!

Harry drew breath in a sharp hiss of apprehension — fought hard against the urge to crouch down, which would only serve to illustrate his awareness — and looked this way and that along the dark alley. E-Branch? No, for there was no strength there, no talent, no metaphysical power. So who and what were they? And where?

Along the alley a cigarette glowed in the dark as someone took a drag, someone keeping to the shadows no less than the Necroscope himself. And across the main road under a lamp-post, there stood a figure in a dark, lightweight overcoat with his hands stuffed forlornly in his pockets, turning first this way and then that, for all the world like a man stood up who still hopes that his date will show: a decoy, to distract attention from the one in the shadows.

And both of them wondering about Harry, so that he picked up their thoughts in snatches right out of their unsuspecting minds.

The one under the lamp-post: Pound's home, but who's this bugger?… Up and down the street, prowling like a cat… The one we were told to watch out for?… Said if he showed up we shouldn't touch him, but… feather in the old cap… Promotion to Inspector?

And the one in the shadows, who was now stepping out of the shadows and heading Harry's way: Dangerous, they said… Well, let him try it on. If I'm obliged to protect myself… blow his fucking head off! (And Harry could actually feel the man's hand tightening nervously about the rubber grips on the butt of a pistol in his pocket.)

As the one with the gun came almost jauntily on, so the other straightened up and took his hands out of his pockets, then headed across the road towards Harry. And quite casually, patiently (but with their hearts pounding in their chests and their eyes sharp as daggers), so they converged on him.

Harry glared at them and was surprised to hear himself snarl. A river of fire raced in his veins, setting light to something inside which blazed up and sang to him of slaughter and spurting, crimson blood; of life, and of death! Wamphyri!

But the human side said: 'No! These are not your enemies! Upon a time, before you were a law unto yourself, they might even have been your friends. Why hurt them when you can evade them so easily?'

Because it isn't my nature to flee but stand and fight!

'Fight? Not much of a fight! They're like children…'

Oh? Well, at least one of these children has a gun!

The man crossing the road waited for a stream of cars to go by in the nearside lane; he was ten to fifteen paces away, no more. The other one was maybe twenty paces away. But both of them were definitely homing in on Harry. His vampire knew the danger no less than he did, and worked to protect him. The Necroscope sweated a strange, cold sweat and breathed a weird mist, which clung to him like an ever-thickening cloak. And as the two policemen came on, so Harry's mist spilled out of the shadows where he waited and poured itself into view like the exhalations of a basement boiler room.

Their guns are useless now. They can't see me in this. But I can see, smell, sense, even reach out and touch them, if I wish it. Reach out and snuff them!

'Damn you!' Harry cursed himself-or the thing inside him — out loud. 'Damn you — you slimy black bastard thing!'

'Yeah, well never mind all that, pal,' one of the policemen answered him, crouching down and aiming his gun two-handed into the fog. 'We've been damned and cursed before, right? So just come on out of there, OK? I mean, all of that steam has to be bad for you. Do you want to ruin your lungs? Or do you want me to do it for you, eh? Now, I said come on out of there!'

There was no answer, only a sudden swirling as the fog seemed to fold inwards upon itself, as if someone had shaken a blanket or slammed a door right in its heart. And in a few seconds more the mist thinned out, fell to earth, turned to a film of liquid which made the cobbles damp and shiny. And the wall was high, black and blank, with no alley and no basement boiler room.

And there was no one there at all…

Back in Bonnyrig, Trevor Jordan was awake; some immediately forgotten night terror had drenched him in his own sweat and snatched him panting out of his bed in the attic room; now he prowled the rooms and corridors of the old house where it stood by the river, putting on all the lights, his every nerve jumping as he looked out from curtained windows into the night. Just what his apprehensions were he couldn't say, but he felt something looming, hovering, waiting. Some terrible Thing for the moment conserving its energy, but full of monstrous intent.

Was it Harry, Jordan wondered? The thing that Harry was far too rapidly becoming? Possibly. Could it be concern over Harry's fate if — when — E-Branch finally moved on him? Well, yes, that too. Or was he worried about his own fate, if he was still with the Necroscope at that time? Was this how Yulian Bodescu had felt at Harkley House in Devon, that evening when the Branch had closed in on him to destroy him? Something like this, Jordan was sure.

It was time for Jordan to leave Harry, and he knew it. To leave him for good and merge back into the mundane world of ordinary men. Oh, the telepath knew he could never more be truly mundane, for he had seen the other side and returned from it. But he could try. He could work at it, work into it, gradually forget that he had been — God, he couldn't bear the thought of the word even now! — that he had not been alive, and eventually become just another man again, albeit one with a talent. And when Harry was well out of it and fled into that other world which Jordan could scarcely imagine, then he might even return to the Branch. If they would take him back. But of course they would want to be sure about him first. They would want to check that he was who and what he was supposed to be.

But the trouble was (and Jordan knew now that this must be the source of his nightmare) that he couldn't be sure he would be the same person. For if Harry's awful metamorphosis continued to accelerate…

Harry!

Jordan sucked air gaspingly as telepathic awareness of the Necroscope suddenly flooded his being. The sensation was like being doused with ice-water, causing his whole body to shudder violently. Harry, out there somewhere, across the river. Harry, listening to Jordan, to his thoughts. But how long had he been there?

Only a minute or two, in fact. And he had not been eavesdropping on Jordan but telepathically checking the vicinity of the house. He had detected something of Jordan's fears, however, which did precious little to calm the beast which raged within him, denied expression when he'd fled from the two policemen watching Johnny Pound's flat.

The reason Harry chose to emerge from the Möbius Continuum into the bushes on the far side of the river and not directly into the house was simple: when he'd read the minds of those plain-clothes policemen in Darlington, he'd plainly seen that they were expecting him. Indeed, someone had told the man with the gun that Harry might be dangerous. Obviously E-Branch must have alerted them to the possibility of him showing up. So… whatever Darcy Clarke had told the Branch about him, it hadn't cut any ice. They weren't having any.

And if they were looking out for him in Darlington, plainly it wouldn't take long before they were doing it here, too. He'd scared off Paxton (for the moment, anyway) but Paxton was only one of them and untypical of the species. So from now on he would have to check locations very carefully before venturing into what were previously 'safe' places. It all went to reinforce the Necroscope's feeling of claustrophobia, a doom-laden sensation of space — Möbius space included — narrowing down for him. To say nothing of time.

And now, to discover that Trevor Jordan was also afraid of him, of what Harry might do to him… it was too much.

The dead — even Möbius himself — had turned against him; his mother had become worn out and left him; there was no one in the world, neither alive nor dead, who had anything good to say on his behalf. And this was the world, and the race, which he had fought so long and so hard for. Not even his own race. Not any longer.

Harry stepped through a Möbius door into a dark corridor of the house across the river and silently commenced to climb the stairs to his own bedroom. Suddenly he was tired; his cares seemed too great; sleep would be curative, and… to hell with everything! Let the future care for itself.

But Jordan's voice stopped him when he was only halfway up the first flight: 'Harry?' The telepath looked up at him from the foot of the stairs. Trevor Jordan, who could read the Necroscope's mind as easily as Harry read his. 'I… shouldn't have been thinking those things.'

Harry nodded. 'And I shouldn't have overheard you. Anyway, don't worry about it. You did your bit for me and did it well, and I'm grateful. And it won't be so bad being alone, for I've been alone before. So if you want to go, then go — go now! For let's face it, I'm losing more and more control to this thing, and leaving now might be the safest thing to do.'

Jordan shook his head. 'Not while the whole world's against you, Harry. I won't leave you yet.'

Harry shrugged and turned away, and continued to climb the stairs. 'As you wish, but don't leave it too long…'

4 Dreams…

The night was still young when Harry laid his head on the pillow, but the moon was up and the stars were bright, and it was his time. His senses were no longer strong in daylight, but in the dark of the night they were sensitive as never before. Even those which governed or were governed by his subconscious mind. And his dreams were stronger, too.

He dreamed first about Möbius and sensed that it was more than an ordinary dream. The long-dead mathematician came and sat on his bed, and while his face and form were indistinct, his deadspeak voice was as sharp and no-nonsense as ever.

The last time we can talk, Harry — in this world, anyway.

Are you sure you want to? the Necroscope answered. It seems I can't help giving people a bad time lately.

The vague, weightless figure of Möbius nodded. Yes, but we both know that's not you. That's why I've chosen to come to you now, while your dreams are still your own.

Are they?

I think so. Certainly you sound more like the Harry I used to know.

Harry relaxed a little, sighed and sank down in his bed. So what is it you want to talk about?

The other places, Harry. The other worlds.

My cone-shaped parallel dimensions? The Necroscope gave a wry, apologetic shrug. They were mainly bluff: I argued for argument's sake. We were practising, my vampire and I.

That's as it may be, Möbius answered, but bluff or none you were right anyway. Your intuition, Harry. The only thing your vision didn't take into account was how.

How?

More rightly, who, said Möbius.

How? Who? Are we talking about God again?

The Big Bang, said Möbius. The primal light, back at the dawn of space and time. All of this couldn't have come out of nothing, Harry. And yet we've already decided that before The Beginning there was nothing. Which was foolish of us, because we both know that you don't need flesh to have mind!

God, Harry nodded. The Ultimate Incorporeal Being. He made it all, right? But to what end?

Möbius's turn to shrug. To find out what would happen, maybe?

You mean He didn't already know? What's that for omniscience?

Unfair, said Möbius. No one can know before the fact. And it's dangerous to try. But He's known everything since.

Tell me about the other places, said Harry, fascinated despite himself.

The world of Starside and Sunside is one, Möbius told him. But it was … a failure. There were unforeseen paradoxes and things went disastrously wrong. Starside, the vampire swamps and the Wamphyri themselves: they were cause and effect both! But that's for the future, and for the past! To tell it now might be to change it, which would be presumptuous.

Space and time are relative, Harry argued. Haven't I always said so? And in their own way they're fixed. You can't damage them by talking about them.

Möbius chuckled, however sadly. Clever, Harry, I'll grant you that. But you can't work your vampire wiles on me, my boy! And anyway, Starside isn't the place I'm talking about.

Well, I'm listening, the Necroscope answered, just a little disgruntled.

Once when we talked, Möbius reminded him, you mentioned the balance of the multiverse, with black and white holes shifting matter around between all the different layers of existence and delaying or even reversing entropy. Like the weights governing the swing of an old clock's pendulum. But that's only one sort of balance, the physical sort. Then there's the metaphysical, the mystical, the spiritual.

God again?

The balance between Good and Evil.

Which all had origin in the same source? Your argument, August Ferdinand! Remember, 'there was nothing before The Beginning'. Right?

We're not in dispute, Möbius shook his head. On the contrary, we're in complete agreement!

Harry was astonished. God had a dark side?

Oh, yes, which he cast out!

The mathematician's words and their delivery had riveted Harry. And I can do the same? Is that what you're saying?

I'm saying that the other places are like levels, some of which are higher and some lower. And what we do here determines the next step. We go up or down.

Heaven or Hell?

Möbius shrugged again. If it helps you to think of it like that.

You mean that when I move on, I can leave my dark side — maybe even my vampire — behind me?

While there's a difference, yes.

A difference?

While we may still distinguish between you.

You mean if I don't succumb?

I have to go now, said Möbius.

But I have to know more! Harry was desperate.

I was allowed to come back, Möbius said, simply. But I am not allowed to stay. My new place is higher, Harry. I really can't afford to lose it.

Wait! Harry tried to stir himself, sit up and take hold of Möbius's wrist. But he couldn't move and anyway, it would be like trying to grasp smoke. And like a set of his own esoteric formulae, the great man mutated into nothingness and was gone…

If anything Möbius's visit had wearied Harry even more than before. He drifted deeper into sleep. But his vampire-influenced mind was full of a certain name, which tormented him and wouldn't let him be. And the name was Johnny Found.

Harry was a telepath; he had a quest, a task which he must finish; and he had a vampire in him. When he had gone to face Faéthor Ferenczy's bloodson Janos in the mountains of Transylvania, the Ferenczy had warned him that only one of them would come out of it alive, and that the winner would be a creature of incredible power. Janos had read the future, seen the same thing, known he couldn't lose. Except… one should never try to understand the future. Read it if you must, but don't try to understand it. Harry had been the one who came down out of the mountains. And though he didn't yet have the measure of his powers — especially his most recent acquisition, telepathy — still they were incredible. They had been incredible before, but now, with the booster which was his vampire…

Dreaming, he no longer had control over his talents, which were active nevertheless. Dreams are the clearinghouses of the mind, where the balance is kept, the cutting-room where all the junk and trivia of life are discarded and the meaningful set in order. That is the function of men's dreams. That and wish fulfilment. And also, for anyone with a conscience, the elevation of suppressed guilt. Which is why men sometimes nightmare.

Harry had his share of guilt, and more than sufficient of desires requiring fulfilment. And what he himself had failed to put in order during his waking hours, his subconscious self — and the vampire which was part of it — would try to put in order while he slept.

His enhanced awareness spread outwards from him to form a telepathic probe which, in a moment, unerringly, leaped all the miles to its target in Darlington. For that target was the sleeping mind of Johnny Found, a mind with a talent as weird as it was warped. Which Harry desired to know about.

And with the sinister guile of the vampire, he need only hint, suggest, propose, strike this chord or maybe that, and with any luck at all Johnny Found would tell him.

All of it…

Johnny was dreaming, too, of his childhood. This wasn't something he would do voluntarily, but a night spectre kept rapping on the door of childhood memories and demanding that he open it.

Childhood memories? Oh, he had them, but he wouldn't say they were worth remembering or dreaming about. Which was why he didn't. Usually.

He tossed a little in his bed; his subconscious mind moaned and went to take up a hammer to nail shut the door to his past; something pushed the hammer aside, beyond his reach, and Johnny could only watch helplessly as the door creaked open. Inside, all the Bad Things of yesterday were waiting for him: the many small crimes he had committed, and the range of punishments and penalties he'd been made to pay for them. But he'd been a child then and innocent (so they said) and would soon grow out of it; and only Johnny himself had known he wouldn't ever grow out of it, and that they'd never be able to find punishments severe enough to fit his crimes.

They'd tried to convince him that the things he did were bad, and had almost succeeded, but by then he was old enough to know that they lied to him, because they didn't understand. And because they didn't understand, they would never know how good the things were which he did. How good they made him feel.

Yes, it had been a lonely place, childhood, where no one understood him or wanted to know about… the things he did. Because they didn't want even to think of such things, let alone know about them.

Lonely, yes, the place beyond that beckoning door. And how much more lonely if he hadn't had the dead things to talk to? And to play with. And to torment.

But because he'd had that — his secret thing, his clever way with creatures which were no more — being an orphan hadn't been nearly so bad. Because he'd known there were others worse off than him, whose plight was far worse. And that if it wasn't, then Johnny could soon make it worse.

The open door both repelled and attracted him. Beyond it, the mists of memory swirled, eddied and hypnotized him; until — against his will? — Johnny found himself drifting in through the door. Where all his childhood was waiting for him…

They'd called him 'Found' because he had been, in a church. And the pews had vibrated with his screams, and the rafters had echoed with them, that Sunday morning when the verger had come to see what all the to-do was about. He was still bloody from birth, the foundling, and wrapped in a Sunday newspaper; and the placenta which had followed him into the world still warm in a plastic bag, stuffed under the bench in one of the pews.

But lusty? Johnny had screamed to wreck his lungs, howled to break the stained-glass windows and bring down the ceiling, almost as if he'd known he had no right to be in that church. Perhaps his poor mother had known it, too, and this had been her attempt at saving him. Which had failed. And not only was Johnny lost, but so was she.

In any case, he'd yelled like that until they took him out of the church to the intensive care unit of a local hospital's maternity ward. And only then, away from God's house, had he fallen silent.

The ambulance which whirled him to the hospital carried his mother, too, found seated against a headstone in the churchyard in a pool of her own blood, head lolling on her swollen breasts. Except unlike Johnny she didn't survive the journey. Or perhaps she did, for a little while…

A strange start to a strange life, but the strangeness was only just beginning.

In the intensive-care ward Johnny had been washed, cared for, given a cot and, for the moment — and indeed for all his life — a name. Someone had scribbled 'Found' on the plastic tag which circled his little wrist, to distinguish him from all the other babies. And Found he'd stayed.

But when a nurse had looked in on him to see why he'd stopped sobbing and gone quiet so suddenly… that had been the weirdest thing of all. Or perhaps not, depending on one's perspective. For his young mother hadn't been quite dead after all. And perhaps she'd heard the babies crying and had known that one of them was hers. That must be the answer, surely? For what other explanation could there be?

There Johnny's unnamed, unknown mother had sat, beside his empty cot; and Johnny in her dead arms, sucking a dribble of cold milk from a dead, cold nipple.

Johnny was at an infant orphanage until he was five, then fostered for three more years until the couple who had taken him split up in tragic circumstances. After that he went to a junior orphanage in York.

About his foster parents: the Prescotts had kept a large house on the very outskirts of Darlington, where the town met the countryside. At the time they adopted Johnny in 1967, they already had a small daughter of four years; but there had been problems and Mrs Prescott was unable to have more children. A pity, for the couple had always planned to be the 'perfect' family unit: the pair of them, plus one boy and one girl. Johnny would seem to fit the bill nicely and make up the deficiency.

And yet David Prescott had been uneasy about the boy from the very first time he saw him. It was nothing solid, just — something he could never quite put his finger on — a feeling; but because of it things were just a little less perfect than they should be.

Johnny was given the family name and became a Prescott — for the time being, anyway. But right from the start he didn't get along with his sister. They couldn't be left alone together for five minutes without fighting, and the glances they stabbed at each other were poisonous even for mismatched children. Alice Prescott blamed her small daughter for being spoilt (which is to say she blamed herself for spoiling her), and her husband blamed Johnny for being… odd. There was just something, well; odd about the boy.

'Well, of course there is!' His wife would round on him. 'Johnny's been a waif, without home and family except in the shape of the orphanage. Yes, and that wasn't the best sort of place, either! Love? Suffer the little children? They seemed altogether too eager to be rid of him, if you ask me! Precious little of love there!'

And David Prescott had wondered: With reason, maybe? But what possible reason? Johnny isn't even six yet. How can anyone turn against a child that small? And certainly not an orphanage, charged with the care of such unfortunates.

The Prescotts had a corner shop which did very nicely, a general store that sold just about everything. It was less than a mile from their home, on the main road into Darlington from the north, and served a recently matured estate of some three hundred homes. Working nine till five four days a week, and Wednesday and Saturday mornings, they made a good living out of it. With the help of a part-time nanny, a young girl who lived locally, they were not overstretched.

David kept pigeons in a loft at the bottom of their large secluded garden; Alice liked to be out digging, planting and growing things when the day's work was done; they took turns seeing to the kids on those occasions when their nanny took time off. So that apart from the friction between Johnny and his sister Carol, the lives of the Prescotts could be said to be normal, pleasant and fairly average. Which was how things stood until the summer when Johnny turned eight. Indeed until then, their lives might even be described as idyllic.

But that was when David Prescott started having problems with his birds; and the family cat — a placid, neutered torn called Moggit, who slept with Carol and was the apple of her eye — went out one morning and never came back in; and there were long periods of that hot, sultry weather which irritates, exacerbates, and occasionally causes eruptions. And it was the same summer when David built a pool for the kids, and roofed it over with polythene on an aluminium frame.

Johnny had thought it would be great fun, swimming and fooling around in his own pool, but he soon became bored with it. Carol loved it, however, which annoyed her adopted brother: he didn't care for people enjoying things which he didn't enjoy, and in any case he didn't much care for Carol at all.

Then, one morning three or four days after Moggit had gone missing, Johnny got up early. He didn't know it, but Carol was awake and throwing her clothes on as soon as she heard his door gently opening and closing. Her brother (she always put a heavy sneering accent on the word), had been getting up early a lot recently — hours before the rest of the household — and she wanted to know what he was doing. It wasn't especially malicious of her, but the fact was she was a little jealous and more than a little curious. Even if Johnny was a pig, still she'd rather have him playing with her in the pool than off on his own playing his stupid, mysterious, lonely games.

As for Johnny: his time was all his own now and no one to make demands on it. School was out for the summer holidays; he had 'things' to do; he could usually be found beyond the garden wall, in the hedgerows where they blended into meadow and farmland that stretched out and away to the north and north west. But he would always come when he was wanted (a loud call would usually bring him home directly), and he was sensible about getting back for mealtimes.

Just what he did out there all the hours of the day was something else. If his foster-parents asked him, he would say, 'Playing,' and that was all. But Carol wanted to know what it was he played at. It was beyond her that he could find anything more interesting than the pool. So she went out after him, tiptoeing past her parent's room, into the early morning light where dawn hadn't long cracked the horizon with its golden smile.

Johnny went down past the pool under its polythene blister to the garden wall. He climbed the high wall at a well-known spot, jumped down the last few feet on the other side. And he started out along the overgrown hedgerow into the maze of fields shimmering in the morning light. And Carol right after him.

Half a mile into the fields, at a junction of ancient, rutted, overgrown tracks, the jumbles of a ruined farm lay humped and green with flowering brambles and clumps of nettles, where sections of broken, grey-lichened wall and the buttressed mass of an old chimney poked up in teetering stacks of stone. Johnny cut diagonally through a meadow and only his dark head, shiny with sweat, could be seen above the tall, swaying grass.

From where she balanced precariously on top of a disused stile, Carol saw where he was heading and resolved to follow him. The old ruin was obviously Johnny's secret place, where he played his secret games. But they wouldn't be secret much longer.

Johnny had disappeared somewhere into the tumble of fallen, weed-grown walls by the time his sister came panting out of the meadow. She paused a while and looked this way and that, along the tracks which had once serviced the farm, then made to cross them to the ruins… and paused again!

What was that! A cry! The cry of a cat? Moggit?

Moggit!

Carol's hand flew to her mouth. She drew a gasping breath and held it. What, poor little Moggit, lost somewhere in the shell of this crumbling old pile? Maybe that was what had drawn Johnny here: the sound of Moggit, jammed in some hole, trapped and starving in this tottering ruin.

Carol thought to call out in answer to Moggit's strange, choking cries and maybe bring him a little hope; but then she thought no, for that would only make him struggle the harder and perhaps get himself in more of a fix. Maybe he was only crying like that, so urgently and piteously, because Johnny was already trying to rescue him.

Holding her breath, Carol crossed the hard-packed, dusty tracks to what once would have been a wide entrance through high farmyard walls to the cluster of buildings within. Now the gap was a mass of collapsed stone choked by brambles and bolting ivy, with a few hazelnuts and straggly elders crushed under the weight of parasitic green. Broken bricks and rubble shifted underfoot where a well-marked trail had been worn through the undergrowth, Carol supposed by Johnny.

Dusty and cobwebbed, the trail in through the foliage was almost a tunnel; the light was shut out; seven-year-old Carol felt stifled as she forced her way through. But when she might have faltered, Moggit's howls (she was sure it must be Moggit, while at the same time praying it was not) drove her on. Until finally she broke cover into yellow sunlight, and blinking the grit out of her eyes saw Johnny where he sat in the central clearing. And saw the…

… The things he had there; but without really seeing them at first, because her child's mind couldn't conceive, couldn't believe. And finally she saw… but no, no, there was no way that this could be Moggit.

What, Moggit of the snow-white belly and paws, the bushy tail and Lone Ranger masked face, the sleek, gleaming black back and neck and ears? This tortured, dangling thing, Moggit? Carol almost fainted; she slumped down behind a broken wall and knocked loose a brick, and Johnny heard the clatter. When his head snapped round on his neck to look Carol's way, he didn't see her at first, only the ruins in the clearing as he'd always known them. But Carol still saw him: his bloated face, bulging, emotionless eyes, and bloody, clawlike hands. His penknife lying open beside him on the wall where he sat, and the sharpened stick with its red point clutched tight in one hand.

And she still saw Moggit, too. Moggit with his hind paws just touching the ground, feebly dancing to stay upright and keep his weight off his neck, which was encircled by a thin wire noose that hung down from the branch of an elder! And one yellow eye hanging out on a thread, dribbling wetly and dancing on his wet furry cheek even as Moggit danced; and his fat white belly thin and crimson now where it had been slit open to let a bulge of shiny black, red and yellow entrails dangle!

And Moggit wasn't all. There were two of Carol's father's favourite pigeons, too, hanging limp from other branches with their wings twisted all askew. And a hedgehog still alive but with a rusty iron spike through its side, pinning it to the ground; so that it staggered dizzily round and around on its own axis in unending agony, snuffling horribly. Yes, and there were other things, too, but Carol didn't want to see any more.

Johnny, satisfied that no one was there, had returned to his 'game'. Through eyes that were brimming with tears, Carol saw him stand up, catch a dead pigeon in one hand and thrust his stick right through its clay-cold body. And he worked the stick in its unfeeling flesh almost as if… as if it wasn't unfeeling at all! As if he really believed that the bedraggled, stiff, broken thing could feel it. And all the while he laughed and talked and muttered to these poor, tortured, alive or dead or soon-to-be-dead creatures, caring nothing for their waking or sleeping agonies. Indeed, his sister now understood something of the nature of his game: that having harried a living thing to its death, Johnny couldn't bear that it had escaped him and so continued to torture it in the lightless world beyond!

And at that she was the first to know the truth about her adopted brother, without even knowing she knew it. For, a child herself, she recognized a child's fancy when she saw one, knew also that Johnny was simply a cruel and hateful boy, and that what she'd imagined just couldn't be.

But Moggit, poor Moggit! Finally it got through to Carol that it was indeed her battered, half-eviscerated cat which Johnny was slowly hanging. And she could bear it no longer.

'MoggHW she screamed at the top of her voice. And: 'Johnny, I hate you — oh, how I hate you!'

She stood up, stumbled and regained her balance, flew at him clutching the jagged half of a brick. Johnny finally saw her and his red-blotched face rapidly turned pale. He snatched up his penknife — not to use on her but with an entirely different, perhaps even worse purpose in mind — and went to slice through a length of tough kite-string which held down Moggit's branch. Strands parted but the string didn't; in a sudden rage Johnny jerked the string this way and that, and Moggit was lifted and whirled like a rag, his hoarse cat cries cut off as the wire bit into his rubbed-raw throat.

Then Johnny gave a gasp of triumph as his knife cut through the string, and Moggit was jerked aloft, choking and spitting for a second or two as the noose tightened to finish the job. But Johnny was so intent on the murder of the cat that Carol was on him. Blindly, whirling her arms, she came at him with the sharp nails of one hand and the half-brick grasped tight in the other. He avoided her raking nails, but a sharp, broken corner of the brick struck him on the forehead and knocked him down. In a moment he was sitting up, shaking his head, looking around for his knife. And his eyes blazed as he glared at his sister and threatened, 'First Moggit, and now you!'

He got unsteadily to his feet, his forehead grazed and bleeding, then spotted his penknife and pounced on it. And in that same moment Carol knew she was in deadly danger. Johnny couldn't let her tell her parents what she had seen, what he had done. And there was only one way he could be sure to stop her.

With a backward glance that took in the whole scene one last time — poor Moggit hanged and bobbing with the motion of the elder branch, the hedgehog finally exhausted, gasping its life out where it lay, and the dead, mutilated birds strung up in a row — she turned away and fled for home. And bursting through the tunnel of undergrowth out of the ruins, she knew that Johnny was right behind her.

And he would have been; except he knew that if she got home first, she would bring someone to see. And he mustn't let anyone see.

Quickly he cut down Moggit and the birds, and yanked the hedgehog's stake from the ground. Panting from the furious pace of his exertions, and from his fury in general, he tossed the lot into a deep, stagnant well which he'd discovered on the site, whose battened cover had long since rotted away in one corner. He hated to see his dead and dying things go down into the dark like that, making splashes in the deep, black, unseen water below. Wasted, all of them, and so much 'life' still left in them! It was all Carol's fault. Yes, and there'd be a lot more to blame her for if she got home first.

He set out after her, following her wailing and the wild, zig-zag, trail she left through the long grass.

A half-mile across rough, open countryside is a long way when you're a heartbroken child with your eyes full of tears. Carol's heart hammered in her breast and her breath was ragged and panting; but to drive her on there was always that picture burning on her mind's eye, of Moggit dangling and jerking in the wire noose, with his guts hanging out like a small bag of crushed fruits when her mother made jam in the kitchen. And to drive her even faster was Johnny's voice crying after her: 'Caaarol! Carol — wait for me!'

She did no such thing; the garden wall was just ahead, at the end of the hedgerow; behind her, panting — and yet growling too, like some savage dog — Johnny was catching up. His groping hand missed her ankle by inches as she half-climbed, half-fell over the wall. But on the garden side she just lay there, too terrified, tearful, too exhausted to go on.

And Johnny jumping down after her, his eyes mad and glaring, small fists tightening and slackening where he held them to his sides. She looked toward the house but it was hidden behind fruit trees and the misted dome of the pool. Would her parents be up yet? She didn't even have the wind for yelling.

Johnny snarled as he bunched her hair in a strong fist and commenced dragging her towards the pool. 'Swimming!' he said, the word bursting from his lips like a bubble of slime. 'You're going swimming, Carol. You're going to like it, I know. And so am I. Especially afterwards!'

For the last week or so, David Prescott had also taken to getting up early. Alice didn't complain or ask why, because he was always so quiet and considerate and invariably brought her a cup of coffee. It must be the summer, the light mornings, the old 'early bird' syndrome. But in fact it was the mail.

Out this way the mail deliveries were always early, the very crack of dawn, and David was expecting a letter. From the orphanage. Not that it would contain anything of any significance — he was sure it wouldn't — but still he'd like to get to it before Alice. If she saw it first… well, she'd only say he was paranoid. About Johnny. And certainly it would look as though he was, else why would he write to the orphanage about him?

The thing was, David was desperate that things should work out all right; he really did want to love the poor kid. But at the same time he'd always been more receptive of mood than Alice — more aware of the aura of people, especially kids — and he knew that Johnny's aura just wasn't right. If it was something out of his past (but what past? He was just a child), something the orphanage would know about, then David believed that he and his wife should be told. For he suspected Alice was right to complain about the attitude of the orphanage; they had seemed too eager to wash their hands of Johnny, or rather: 'To place him in the care of a normal, loving family, where he can grow into a healthy person. Healthy in mind, as well as in body…'

That's what the orphanage director had said the day they went to pick up their new son, and the words had always stuck in David's memory: 'Healthy in mind, as well as in body.'

Something wrong with Johnny's mind? Something a little sick? Or a lot sick? For that was the nature of the aura which David sometimes felt washing out from the boy: a sick one, and clammy as an old man on his deathbed. Johnny felt sick as death. But not his death.

And this morning, sure enough, the letter was there. David tore it open and read it, and for a little while the words made no sense. Budgerigars in the kids' rooms, and Johnny stealing, killing and collecting them? A collection of dead things: mice, beetles, the budgies, even a kitten?

A dead kitten under his bed, crawling with maggots, and Johnny twisting its legs until they came off in his hands? That was how the orphanage people had found out about it, when the other kids came screaming.

But a kitten?

Moggit…?

Screaming?

And David could hear the horrified screams of those kids from here. Except it wasn't those kids but one of his own — no, his own — Carol, from the bottom of the garden!

What…?

And Alice's sleepy, mumbling voice from upstairs, calling down, 'Where's the coffee? The kids are up early.'

And another scream from the garden, cut off gurglingly at its zenith.

David had ever been the one to leap to conclusions, often incorrectly. He did so now, and this time was right.

Down the garden path with his dressing-gown flapping, yelling for Carol, hoarsely, like crazy. But no answer. And a small blurred figure inside the polythene dome, kneeling at the side of the pool. David burst in; it was Johnny kneeling there; he looked as if he were trying to drag Carol out of the water. And she was floating there, face-down, arms limply outstretched, crucified on the blue, gently lapping water.

Johnny had been playing in the fields; he'd heard Carol's screams and seen a man — dirty, bearded, dressed in rags — climbing the wall out of the garden. The man ran away across the fields and Johnny went to see what he'd been doing. Carol was in the pool and he'd tried to drag her out.

He told the story to David, to Alice, the police, anyone who wanted to hear it. And most of them believed him; even David half-believed him, though he didn't want him near any more. And Alice probably believed him, though that would be hard to say for she wasn't much good for anything from that time forward.

The police found a camp site in the ruins of the old farm and brought up a lot of rubbish from the well. Someone, person or persons, must have been living rough there, stealing from gardens and properties (David's pigeons) in order to eat. It could be gypsies (the hedgehog), or maybe a tramp. Hard to say. Chances were they'd get him or them eventually.

But they never did get anyone.

And Johnny went back to the orphanage…

Harry slept on and for a little while longer experienced Johnny Pound's dreams. Of course, he saw Pound's past only from the necromancer's own point of view, which if anything was worse than the whole picture and more than sufficient to guarantee he had the right man. But eventually Pound's excesses became too much — his dreaming memories of his own evil deeds a lurid litany to his inhumanity — by which time Harry's hatred of him had grown into a rage.

Johnny Found had lived all his young life a monster and murderer and so far had got away with it, but until recently his step-sister Carol had remained his single human victim. Between times he'd made do and played his unthinkable 'games' with creatures dead of causes other than murder.

But as men and monsters alike mature, so their tastes also mature, and Johnny was no exception. Except… what grotesque form does maturity take in something rotten from the start?

Once, for entirely unthinkable reasons which even Harry Keogh couldn't bear to contemplate, Found had taken a job in a morgue; only to be fired when his boss became suspicious. It was his dream about another job he'd had, however, this time in a slaughterhouse, which did the trick and, like the last straw, broke the Necroscope's back.

That was when Harry had drawn back his shuddering telepathic probe, pulled out of Johnny's mind and let the man get on with his nightmaring. Except of course in Pound's case the nightmares could barely match up to the reality…

5 … and Fancies

And then the Necroscope had dreamed of Darcy Clarke, which was also a form of nightmare, for in it Darcy was dead and his voice came to Harry as deadspeak.

Even so it didn't come clearly but was distorted, drifting a thousand echoes coming together from all directions and combining to form a strange, out-of-sync sighing.

I couldn't believe you would have done that to me, Harry, said Darcy when he'd established his identity. I mean, I knew the moment they killed me — when I saw that they actually could kill me, despite my guardian angel — that you were responsible. It could only have been something you did inside my head when you were in there. You killed off the thing that watched out for me, and so left me vulnerable. But I still can't believe you would, and I still don't know why. I thought I knew you, but I didn't know you a damn!

This is just a dream, Harry answered him then. This is my conscience — while I still have one — giving me trouble because I protected myself at someone else's expense. This is a nightmare, Darcy, and you're not really dead. It's just me blaming myself that I had to interfere inside your head. As for why I did it: to be sure that if you came up against me before I was out of here, then that you would be vulnerable. Because of all the talents in E-Branch, yours is the one that scares me most. It gives you the edge, makes you invincible. I could try to stop you again and again, and fail, but you would only have to pull the trigger once and I'd be a goner. And it wouldn't be new to you — you could do it-for you've done it before.

Darcy's deadspeak presence was gathering itself now, coming together as an act of sheer will, so that his fragmented voice lost its echoing sigh and took on authority as he said: It's no dream, Harry. I'm dead as can be. And even though I've come to you while you're asleep, still you should be able to see that. But if you doubt me, why not ask your thousands of friends, the Great Majority? The teeming dead will tell you I don't lie. I'm one of them now.

A cop-out! Harry answered, smiling and shaking his head. I can't ask the dead anything, because they don't want to know me any more. Hey, I'm a vampire, remember? I'm not one of you living guys, and I'm not one of those dead ones. I'm somewhere in the middle, Darcy. Undead. Wamphyri!

Harry, said Darcy, bitterly, there's no need for all this subterfuge. You don't have to try out your Wamphyri word-games on me. I'm admitting it: you won. I don't know why you wished me dead, but anyway you got your wish. I am dead! I really am.

Harry tossed and turned in his bed and began to sweat. Sometimes, like any other man, his dreams were just so much junk; or again they might be erotic or esoteric fancies and fantasies; or they could be, well, just dreams. But at other times they were a lot more than that. And this was beginning to feel like one of those times.

OK, he finally said, still unconvinced and wanting desperately to stay that way, so you're dead. So who killed you? And why?

The Branch, Darcy answered, with a typical deadspeak shrug. Who else? Whatever you did to my mind, the mere fact that you'd been in there gave me mind-smog. You interfered inside my head, cancelled something, took something away from me. And in its place I got your taint. No, I'm not saying you vampirized me, just that you… spoiled me. They could smell you on me — in the heart of my being — and they daren't take any chances with me. Which was surely the way you planned it…?

Harry thought about it a moment, then said: Darcy, if you really are dead, if this isn't just my conscience acting up — because you're right and I did interfere with your mind, which I know was wrong — then I'll be able to find you when I'm awake. I mean, we'll be able to talk to each other again, through deadspeak. Right?

He sensed the other's nod. I'll be waiting for you, Harry. Except… it isn't easy. I'm still learning how to get it all together.

Eh? Will you explain?

They burned me and scattered my ashes, Darcy told him. I'm sure I don't have to tell you why…? But it means I have no focal point. I don't belong in any special place. I'm blowing on the winds, drifting on the tides, flushed away down the city's sewers.

And suddenly the Necroscope suspected it was true, and he began to toss and churn in his bed that much more violently. It seemed that Darcy picked up his torment, for when he spoke again his words were less harsh, even conciliatory. If I wrong you with accusations, Harry, it's only because you've wronged me.

This has to be a nightmare, Harry gasped. Darcy it has to be! I didn't mean to harm you. Of all the men I've known, you are the one I couldn't harm! Not under any circumstances. Not because of your talent but because… because you're you. And so you see, this has to be a bloody awful nightmare.

And now Darcy knew that indeed Harry was just as innocent as ever, and that if anyone — anything — were to blame, then it was the creature inside him, which was rapidly becoming one with him. He would have comforted him then, if there was a way, but he felt himself drifting again, coming apart, and he knew he didn't have the strength or the know-how to keep it together. He was only recently dead, after all.

I'll be… around when you're awake, Harry. Try contacting me then. It will be… easier… if you… come looking… for me…

And with that Harry was alone again. For a while, at least. Gratefully, he relaxed and sank down deep in his bed, and even deeper into sleep. As is the way of dreams, he quickly forgot the last one and prepared to move on to the next –

— Which was when the Necroscope dreamed of someone else. Except that this time he knew for sure it was more than just a dream and that his visitor was or had been more than merely human. For his parasite responded to this visitor — this other vampire — in typical Wamphyri fashion, prompting Harry to inquire: Who are you, that you dare come creeping into my sleeping thoughts? Answer quickly… there are doors in my mind which would swallow you whole!

Ahhh! came back the answer at once. So it's true. You won your fight with Janos, but you also lost. I'm so sorry, Harry. So sorry.

And now Harry knew him. Ken Layard! he said. We took your head and burned your body in the mountains over Halmagiu. And you went willingly to your death.

Layard answered with a deadspeak nod. Death was nothing compared to the prospect of being undead, in thrall to Janos Ferenczy. He would have put me down into ashes, too… but only to have me at his beck and call, and bring me up again whenever he had need of my talent! Anyway, and as you said, I went willingly. For I knew it would be harder for me if I tried it the other way. And Bodrogk and his Thracians were quick about it. I didn't feel a thing.

Harry's deadspeak thoughts turned sour. But you owe me one, right? The worst one you can give me? Because whichever way you look at it, I was the one who tracked you down. And now they're about to track me down, and so you've come to gloat.

Layard was taken aback. How wrong can you be, Harry? he said. Listen, I know you've been getting a hard time from the teeming dead, but you still have a few friends left!

You came in friendship?

I came to say thanks! For Trevor Jordan.

Harry shook his head. I don't follow you.

To thank you for what you did for him. And to offer my help if there's anything I can do for you.

The Necroscope began to make sense of it. Trevor was your friend and colleague, right? You and he were one of the best teams — one of the best partnerships — E-Branch ever had.

The best! said Layard. So when I died it was only natural I'd want to keep tabs on him, see how he made out. What I did best in life came even easier in death, and in life I'd been one hell of a locator. Which was pretty fortunate for me, else I'd have had a really dreary time of it. What, me? A vampire? The dead didn't want to know me, Harry.

So locating people you'd known in life occupied a little of your time, eh?

A little of it? All of it! I mean, once you get over your fear of death — of being dead — it can pretty soon get boring! So I traced Trevor, and discovered that he was dead, too, and I would have spoken to him except the Great Majority did a job on me and blocked me out. There are some fine talents among the dead, Harry, and not a lot they can't do if they've a mind. So they'd throw up a lot of deadspeak flak every time I tried to talk to anyone. Anyone, that is, except…

… Me?

Exactly! They'll do their damnedest to mess us around, but they don't mess with us! We want to talk to each other, that's fine — just as long as we're not trying to pervert one of them.

I see, Harry said. So the only way you could get to speak to Trevor was through me.

That's right.

Except you're too late and your deadspeak won't work anyway — because Trevor is alive again. Which means you still can't communicate direct but must use me as a go-between.

Complicated but, in a nutshell, correct.

Well, you picked the wrong time, Harry was half-apologetic. Try me when I'm awake.

I'll do that. But in the meantime — maybe I can do you a favour, too.

Oh?

Harry, Layard said, I was one of the good guys a long time before I copped it. And even at the end I was still pretty much my own man. I was a creature of Janos's making, 'in thrall' to him, yes, but given even the smallest chance I'd have taken him out if that were at all possible. It wasn't possible — not for me, anyway — and so I died. But you'll never know how glad I am that he got his, too. So as you said, I owe you one. Not one of the worst but a good one. Like… the talent of locating? How would you like to be a locator, Harry?

It would come in handy, certainly, the Necroscope answered. I already have deadspeak, telepathy, one or two other things. Being able to find someone or thing in a hurry would be a big bonus.

That's what I thought. So maybe we can trade. You get my talent, and I get to talk to you now and then, plus a reintroduction to Trevor Jordan. I mean, you act as our go-between. Trevor would like that, I'm sure.

What will it entail? Harry became cautious.

Well, Layard offered a deadspeak shrug, I'm already in your mind — in contact, anyway — so I suppose you'll just have to open up and let me look deeper inside. I mean, I know my own trick, the mechanism which makes me a locator, and if I can find a similar thing in you…

… And activate it?

Something like that.

And you want me to open up to you of my own free will, right?

Layard chuckled, albeit drily. You've played this game before, Harry.

Harry nodded. Yes, I have, occasionally with disastrous consequences.

Layard was serious at once. Harry, there's none of that shit in me. I was still myself when I went out. I don't have anything up my sleeve.

The Necroscope considered it. But what did he have to lose? Very well, he finally said, except… I've already warned you that my mind's a weird place. Don't try to mess with me, Ken. You don't have much, I know, but I swear if you fool around in there I won't leave you with anything.

Hey, you don't have to convince me!

OK, Harry said. And, after a moment: One last thing. You said you came to thank me, for what I did for Jordan? I take it you mean his resurrection? So how did you know I'd brought him back?

Layard shrugged. Just because the Great Majority don't speak to me doesn't me I can't eavesdrop now and then. Also, the dead don't move around too much, you know? But Trevor does. So I knew that what I'd heard was true. You have a heap of rare talents there, Harry. A pity you didn't get Darcy's too, before they got him!

That focused the Necroscope's attention to a pin-point.

He fastened on it in a moment. Darcy's dead? I thought that was just a nightmare. I hoped it was, anyway. Which means I have to hope this is, too.

You have my sympathy, Harry, Layard told him. But it's all real.

No one brings me any good news any more… Lost for words, Harry shook his head, then deliberately returned to the former subject. All right, Ken, my mind's all yours.

The locator went in — and was out again almost as quickly. And: You're right and that's a strange place, Harry, he said. It's as if it was radioactive in there: hot and cold at the same time! But I found what I wanted; or rather, I didn't find it. You don't have the equipment. There's nothing there for me to switch on.

Harry shrugged. You tried, anyway.

But you do have David Chung's kind of mind.

Chung? The sympathetic locator?

That's right. So I tripped that switch instead. Now all you need is something belonging to the one you need to locate. You focus on it, and bingo! Except being what you are — everything you are — you'll probably be better at it than Chung is.

Harry nodded, said: Well, I suppose it's my turn to owe you again. Thanks, Ken.

Oh, I'll be back later to collect, Layard told him. I mean, Trevor was like my kid brother, you know? And now I'll go and let you get some sleeping done. You're tired, Harry, in mind and body both.

As Layard backed off and faded into nothing, the Necroscope's mind cleared itself for whatever else, whoever else, was waiting. And she didn't take long in coming.

He dreamed of Penny. But was she a dream… or just a fancy? Even dreaming, he wondered about it: was she an adjustment of psyche — part of the pigeon-holing of mundane occurrences into all the subconscious slots between forget it, through trivial, to highly important — or just a remnant left over from a moment or two of waking lust?

He'd known of course that the dead girl had a crush on him. It had been obvious even from their first meeting. For after all, how many men get to see their ladies naked on a first date? In Harry's day, damn few! Maybe this was simply the extrapolation of something his subconscious mind had been working on, and should have been titled: 'How Things Might Have Been if Harry Keogh Could Spare the Time and if He Wasn't a Bloody Vampire'.

Whichever, it was a soothing and blessed relief to his tormented mind after the nightmare of association with Johnny Found, the delirium of Darcy Clarke's accusations, and the revelations of Ken Layard; and it brought physical relief, too, as he answered Penny's caresses and loved her with his body as any ordinary man loves a girl. The initiative, however, was all hers — had to be — else his exhaustion must drag him down even deeper into dreamless sleep.

And Harry wondered about that, too: how come she knew how to do it all? For after all, he knew she was an innocent… his little innocent, whose death he would soon avenge.

'Isn't bringing me back enough?' she whispered, guiding his rubbery fingers to her stiffening nipples. 'Do you have to go after him, too? You know, Harry, I've been doing a lot of thinking since all of this happened. And, I mean, I've got so much to be glad for. I was dead, and now I'm alive! It would be sort of ungrateful of me to want revenge, too. Oh, I wanted it at first, I know, but now I'm not so sure. But I'd settle for you, certainly.'

He lay back and listened to her, and felt her small, gentle fingers tight on his flesh where it throbbed, but lazily as yet like a motor waiting for the throttle. And in the darkness she sat up beside him, crouched over him, and patted him with her hands so that he swayed from side to side, jerking and snatching at the darkness.

Are the sexual arts instinctive in some people? Harry couldn't remember who had shown him. Or had he just known? Maybe he would remember when he woke up. But for the moment he didn't want to wake up. Here, now, asleep, he was just a man. No more the Necroscope, no more the vampire, just a man being loved and making love, and waiting for the sweet sucking thing which was the heart of Penny's womanhood to descend on to his silently singing flesh. And hoping against hope that the dream wouldn't fade or change its course, and that he would get to come. The last time he'd made love had been… just weeks ago, but already it felt like forever. He felt full to bursting. Maybe it was just being with this girl, Penny, just being human, which from now on he could never be again.

And the poignancy of that was so great that when at last, gasping, she actually slid her sweet young body down onto him, he came almost at once, like an urgent youth stroking his first love's breasts. And feeling him shuddering within her — the hot spurt of his juices — she clenched him that much tighter, until the jerking of his flesh had spent him to the last drop.

Following which… the gradual resurgence of his need was slow but sure, and her guidance unwavering, until he was in her again.

This time they lay on their sides, and while his left hand stroked, squeezed and compressed the pillow of her right buttock, so the tight tube of her vagina sucked on him for the milk of love and life. And Harry thought: If this were real I wouldn't dare, for fear of making her pregnant with my damned 'milk of life'! Or in my case, my tainted Wamphyri sperm!

And deep inside his vampire laughed at him. Milk of life? Frothing spume of lust, more like. For as everyone knows, only the blood is the true life.

'Harry!' she clawed at his shoulders, rubbed his chest furiously with her flattened, generous breasts. And, 'Harry!' she panted again. 'I'm coming… coming… coming!'

It brought him to climax, too, the thought of her orgasm and the feel of its wet, wrenching tremors. But more than that, it brought him to his senses. Suddenly he was awake. Wide awake in their sweat and their fluids and the pungent smell of their love — which wasn't fading back into the depths of his subconscious mind! Which wasn't the ephemeral stuff of dreams! Which was in fact totally, terribly, real! Because Penny was there in his bed with him!

Harry gasped and opened his eyes, and shot bolt upright in the tumbled bed.

'It's all right, it's OK!' Penny said, grasping his wrists in the moment before she saw his eyes. Then: 'Oh!' she said, as her hand flew to her mouth.

Harry's mind whirled. What the hell was happening here? How had Penny got into the house? Where was Jordan? 'Oh?' he finally repeated her. 'Bloody oh!? Penny, you don't realize what you've done!'

He tossed back the covers and pulled on his clothes; naked, she came after him, drew him to a standstill and reached tremblingly to touch his redly illumined face in the darkness of the room.

'When I was dead,' she said in a whisper, 'they tried to tell me you were a monster. I wouldn't listen to them, because I didn't want to talk to dead people. But I remember they said there was life, and death, and a place between the two. People have existence in the first two places but not in the third, which is reserved for…'

'… For vampires,' Harry cut in, harshly. 'Yes, and for their victims, people they turn into vampires. And for foolish girls who through their thoughtless actions change themselves into vampires!'

She shook her head. 'But you didn't take my blood, Harry. You didn't even make me bleed!' She was defiant. 'I'm almost nineteen and anyway, I wasn't a virgin. I… I knew a man for a whole year, once.'

'Knew a man!' he snorted. 'You're a child!'

'And you're out of touch!' she hit back. 'It's 1989! Plenty of girls — British girls — get married at sixteen and seventeen these days. Yes, and plenty more prefer not to get married but simply live with their lovers. I'm no child. Are you saying my body felt like a child's?'

'Yes!' he snapped, then gritted his teeth, folded her in his arms and groaned, 'No. You felt — you feel — like a woman. But still a foolish one. Penny, you don't understand. I didn't need to make you bleed. You see, there's something of me in you now. It's not much but it doesn't need to be, for even a little is enough to change you.'

'Then let it, as long as I'm with you.' She clutched him to her. 'You brought me back, Harry, gave me my life. For what it's worth, I owe it to you. All of it. And I want you to have it.'

'You've run away from home?' He put her away from him, to arm's length.

'I've left home,' she sighed. 'Nineteen-eighty-nine, remember?'

He wanted to hit her and couldn't. He thought: Dear God, she's in thrall to me! And then thought, But she was even before this. Except we'd call it a 'crush'. Please don't let anything of me — of that — be in her!

His head cleared; sleep and all that had accompanied it receded; the implications came home to him, fully. 'What time is it?' He glanced at his watch. Only 10:30 p.m. 'How did you find me? More importantly, how did you get in?'

She sensed his urgency and reacted to it. 'What's wrong, Harry?' And now her eyes were frightened.

As he put on the lights and his face took on a more normal aspect, she said, 'When I was here before, I saw the address on some of your mail. I remembered it, remembered everything about you. In fact you haven't been out of my mind for a minute. And I knew I would have to come to you. No matter what.'

'And Trevor Jordan let you in? Without waking me?' Harry hurled open his bedroom door. 'Trevor!' he shouted. 'Will you come — the — hell — up here?!'

There was no answer, just Penny shaking her head.

Harry looked at her: long-legged, yellow-haired, blue-eyed. His gaze took in her firm breasts, thighs and backside, all of her beautiful young body. And the uneven slant of her mouth, which was quite unintentioned but still made her look sexy and somehow provocative. When he'd first seen her like this, naked, there had been ugly black holes in her flesh. But now she was whole again. Whole, but probably unholy.

'Better get dressed,' he said. And: 'Jordan?'

'Gone,' she said, slipping easily into her clothes. 'I told him I had to be with you, but not how I intended to be with you. He made me promise to look after you, and told me to tell you goodbye.'

That's all?'

'No, he also said I shouldn't stay. When he couldn't convince me, then he left. He said you'd understand. Oh, and I remember he said he hoped that — er, E-Branch? — that they would understand, too. For his sake.'

'E-Branch,' Harry echoed her. And then, remembering his dream, 'Darcy!'

'Who?' She was dressed. She stared at him.

'Go downstairs,' he said. 'Make some coffee. For yourself. There's red wine in the fridge for me. Pour me a glass.'

'Harry, I — '

'Do it now!'

She went.

And when he was alone, Harry sent out his deadspeak thoughts to search for Darcy Clarke, and prayed he wouldn't find him… but found him anyway. Found him blowing on the wind, drifting with the tides, flushed away like so much flotsam. Or maybe jetsam? Jetsam, yes: materials hurled from the deck of a ship in peril. Sacrificed for the greater good.

The Necroscope sat on the edge of his bed and shed several hot, slow tears. It was his humanity, amplified by the overpowering emotions of the Wamphyri. Even if he were only human he would have cried, except then his tears wouldn't burn like the overflow of the volcano rumbling within.

'Darcy,' he said, 'who was it?'

lt was you, Harry. Darcy's deadspeak was faint as the wind over the sea, heard in the whorl of a small shell.

'God, I know!' Harry felt stabbed to the heart. 'But who was it physically? Who took your life? And… how did you die? Not the old way?'

The stake, the sword, the fire? No, just a bullet. Well, two bullets. The fire wasn't until later.

'And your executioner?'

Why? So you can go after him? No, no, Harry. For after all he was only doing his job — and he obviously suspected that I was a deadly threat. Also… well, it's a fact my own actions could have been more prudent. So maybe it was as much my fault as it was yours. But on the other hand, maybe if I'd known I was no longer protected, then I would have been more careful.

'You won't tell me who killed you?'

I have told you. You did.

Then I'll have to find out some other time, from someone else.'

Why don't you just steal it out of my deadspeak mind?

'I don't just take. Not from my friends. If you won't tell me of your own free will, then I'll just have to find out some other way.'

But you did take — and not just information — and it most certainly was not of my own free will! So that now I'm a dead friend. Just one of the Great Majority.

A third party asked, 'Find out what some other way?' And Harry gave a small start. But it was only Penny, standing in the doorway with a glass of red wine in her hand. She'd heard the Necroscope apparently talking to himself.

Harry's concentration slipped; Darcy Clarke's deadspeak disintegrated; contact was lost. But Harry wasn't angry. Not with Penny. If he and Darcy had continued, then they probably would have parted on even worse terms. 'Let's go downstairs,' he said. 'Out into the garden. It's a warm night. Are the stars out? I'd like to look at the stars. And think.'

He would like to look at his stars, yes: the familiar constellations. For who could say, maybe it would be his last opportunity. And the stars over Starside were very different. And he would like to think. About what Penny had said, for one thing: did he really need to even the score with Johnny Found? And why the hell should he want to know who had killed Darcy Clarke? Darcy wasn't himself vengeful, was he?

And then there was Ken Layard and his gift. Harry was now a locator. Well, and he always had been, to an extent.

Telepathically, he could readily seek and discover others of his acquaintance, such as Zek Föener and Trevor Jordan. And given an introduction to a dead person, from then on he'd always been able to find his way to that person's graveside. And no matter the distance, he'd rarely had difficulty conversing with such dead friends. But now… the teeming dead didn't much want to speak to him any more.

Some do, said another voice in his metaphysical mind, one which laved him like a shower on a sweltering hot day. It was Pamela Trotter, and she was a breath of fresh air.

Penny had come into the garden with the Necroscope, but of course she hadn't heard Pamela's deadspeak. Harry sent her indoors; if not, she would only talk to him, question and distract him. But turning away towards the house she looked as if she might cry, and so he said: 'I'm not putting you away from me, but I need to be alone for a couple of minutes. After that we'll have lots of time for being together.' Because I'll have to watch you until I'm sure you're just you. Or if it comes to the worst, until I'm sure that you're something else.

His thoughts were deadspeak, or good as, and Pamela picked them up. As Penny went back indoors, so the ex-whore said: A vampire lover, Harry? I'm jealous!

'Well, you shouldn't be.' He shook his head and explained what had happened, the trouble Penny had probably landed herself in.

Hey, I could use that sort of trouble! Pamela retorted. I mean, I really wouldn't mind being undead with someone like you! But… too late for that. I'm not much up to fun and games any more. Maybe just one last time, eh? For the right man, you know?

She went quiet and waited for his answer; a long, pregnant pause which defied him to cry off now. Not that he intended to. Eventually he said, 'You think we should go ahead with it?'

She sighed. Well, no question which one of you is in charge right now.

'Oh?'

You have the upper hand, Harry — the human you. For if your vampire was ascendant you'd have no such doubts. You would know what was right!

Harry gave a snort. 'My vampire would know what to do for the best? The best for my vampire, maybe!'

So what's your problem? (She was becoming impatient with him.) You're one and the same, or will be.

'My problem is simple,' the Necroscope answered. 'If the dark side of me gets its way, the human side loses — perhaps permanently. So maybe I should just let the police have Johnny Found. I know that left to their own devices they'll get him soon enough anyway, because they're right on his tail even now. But — '

— But we had a deal! she cut in. I can't believe you'd want to cry off. I mean, you were so hot for this! Did I let you into my mind — to read what you read there — for nothing? And the other girls? Are they dead for nothing, with no chance to square it? You were the only chance we ever had, Harry. And now you say let the police have him? I mean, fuck the police! Why, they wouldn't even know what to do with him! What, lock him up in a lunatic asylum for a couple of years, then turn him loose to do it again? No! You were right the first time around: he has to pay now. The full price.

He held up his hands. 'Pamela, wait — '

Wait, nothing! You… chickenshit vampire! Have me and the others been digging our way out all this time for nothing?

That took Harry by surprise. 'Others?'

I've made a few friends. And they want to help.

'So.' He shrugged. 'Let them help…'

And after long, wondering moments: Then… you haven't changed your mind?

He shook his head. 'Not for a minute. I was just thinking my way round it, that's all. You're the one who's coming on all excited and changeable.'

She was silent for a count of three, then said, I think that just now, just a minute ago, you deliberately let me run on — or off-at the mouth!

'It's possible,' he admitted, nodding. 'We chickenshit vampires are like that: argumentative just for the sake of it.'

I'm sorry, Harry, (she felt an utter fool), but it's just that we're all set now. And when I homed in on you, it seemed to me you might be reconsidering things.

'No,' he said again, 'just thinking things through — or maybe arguing with myself — for the sake of it. What did you want, anyway?'

He could almost hear her sigh of relief. I was hoping you'd have some idea when we can expect…?

'Soon.' He cut her off. 'It has to be very soon now.' And to himself: Because if I'm going to get Johnny Found, it has to be before E-Branch gets after me. If they're not already after me.

In fact he strongly suspected that they were — no, he knew that they must be — and the night would yet prove him right…

Harry finished his drink and went back inside.

Penny was waiting for him, pale and lovely, and the look on her face begged the question: what's going to become of us? The Necroscope wasn't sure yet, so gave her a kiss instead. Which was when she asked him how it had happened to him. That was something he'd asked himself time and again, until he now believed he had the answer.

Wasting few words, he quickly told her about old Faéthor Ferenczy's place in Ploiesti, Romania: the once-ruins where an ancient father of vampires had lain, where surely by now the bulldozers had levelled everything and a concrete mausoleum was mushrooming to the grey skies. Except the vast hive would not be intended as a memorial to the evil of Faéthor (for he had been secretive to the end, so that no one living today remembered him) but to that of the madman Ceausescu's agro-industrial obsession. Anyway, there was nothing of Faéthor left there now; or, if anything, only a memory. And even then not in the people, only in the earth which the Great Vampire had poisoned.

'I'd lost my talents,' Harry explained. 'I had no deadspeak and was locked out of the Möbius Continuum. But Faéthor told me he could fix all that if I would only go to see him. I was over a barrel and had to do it; but in fact he did give me back my deadspeak, and he assisted in my rediscovery of the Möbius Continuum. But all of that was incidental to his plan, which was to come back, to return as a Power and a Plague into the world of men.

'As to how he would do it: I still don't know if it was an act of evil will or the automatic action of alien nature. I don't know whether Faéthor caused it to come about, or if he knew it would happen of its own accord. I can't be sure it wasn't something he himself set in motion, "with malice aforethought", or simply the last gasp of his own vampire's incredible urge for survival. All I know for sure is that there's nothing more tenacious than a vampire.

'The mechanics of the thing were simple: Faéthor had died when his home was bombed during the war. Staked through by a fallen ceiling beam, and decapitated out of mercy by a man who happened upon the scene, his body had been burned. Nothing of him escaped the fire… or did it?

'What of his fats — vampire fats — rendered down from his flesh, dripping into cracks in the floorboards, seeping into the earth while the rest of the house and Faéthor's flesh went up in flames? The Greek Christian priests of old had known how to deal with vampires: how every piece of the Vrykoulakas must be burned, because each smallest part has the power of regeneration!

'Anyway, that's how I see it: Faéthor's spirit — and not only that but something of the monster's physical essence, too — had remained there in the atmosphere of the place, and in the earth, waiting. But waiting for what? To be triggered? By what? By Faéthor, when he found himself a suitable vessel or vehicle into the future? I believe so. And also that I was to have been that vehicle.

'Something of him — call it his essential fluids, if you like — had gone down into the earth under his ruins to escape the furnace heat, and when I went to see him and laid myself down to sleep upon that selfsame spot (God, I did, I really did!) then that something surfaced to enter into me. But what was it? I had seen nothing there but a few bats flitting on the night air, which came nowhere near me.

'No, I had seen… something.'

At this point the Necroscope directed Penny's fascinated gaze to a shelf of books on the wall by the fireplace. There were a dozen of them, all with the same subject: fungi. She stared hard at the books, then at Harry. 'Mushrooms?'

He shrugged. 'Mushrooms, toadstools, fungi — as you can see, I've made something of a study of them. In fact they've occupied quite a bit of my time in the last few weeks.' He got her one of the books, titled The Handbook Guide to Mushrooms and Other Fungi, and turned to a well-thumbed page near the back. 'That's not the one.' He tapped a fingernail on the illustrated page. 'But it's the closest I've found. My fungus was more nearly black — and rightly so.'

She looked at the page. 'The common earthball?'

Harry gave a grunt. 'Not so common!' he answered. 'Not the variety I saw, anyway. They weren't there when I settled down to sleep, but they were there when I woke up: a ring of morbid fruiting bodies — small black mushrooms or puffballs — already rotting and bursting open at the slightest movement, releasing their scarlet spores. I remember I sneezed when their dust got up my nose.

'Later, when they'd rotted right down, their stench was… well, it was like death. No, it was death. I remember how the sun seemed to steam them away. Shortly after that, Faéthor wished me well — which should have been a warning in itself — and advised me not to waste any time but complete the task I'd set myself with despatch. I thought it a queer thing to say, that the way he'd said it had been queer, but he didn't elaborate.'

She shook her head. 'You breathed the spores of a toadstool and became…?'

'A vampire, yes.' Harry finished it for her. 'But they weren't the spores of just any toadstool. These things were spawned of Faéthor's slime, of his rottenness. They were his deadspawn. But… well, that wasn't all there was to it. For I'd had a lot of truck with vampires, too, over the years, and I'd learned their ways — perhaps learned too much. Maybe that's also part of it, I'm not sure. But at least you can see now why you shouldn't have gone to bed with me. A few spores was enough for me. So… what about you?'

'But as long as I'm with you…'she began.

'Penny — ' he cut in, ' — I'm not staying here. I'm not even staying in this world.'

She flew into his arms. 'I don't care which world! Take me wherever you go, whenever you go, and I'll always be there to care for you.'

Well, he thought, and I will need someone. And you are a lovely creature. And out loud: 'But I can't go anywhere until Found is finished. It's not just for you but all the others he murdered, too. And one in particular. I made her a promise.'

'Found?'

'Johnny Found, that's his name. And I have to get after him. He has to die because he's… he's like me and all the others I've had to deal with: not meant to be. Not in any clean world. I mean, Found hurts the very dead! Isn't dying enough without him, too? And what if he ever fathers children? What will they be, eh? And will their mother leave them on a doorstep like Johnny was left? No, he has to be stopped here, now.'

Just thinking about the necromancer had worked Harry into a fury, or if not Harry, his vampire certainly. He wondered what Found was doing right now, this very moment.

He more than wondered — he had to know.

Harry freed himself from Penny's arms, put out the light, stood dark in the darkened room and reached out with his metaphysical mind. He knew Pound's address, knew the way there. He sent a probe there, to Darlington, the street, the house, into the ground-floor flat… and found it empty.

This was his chance to take something belonging to the necromancer. Would there be watchers in the street? Probably. But with any luck he wouldn't be there long enough that they'd see him. 'Penny, I have to go somewhere now,' he said. 'But I'll be right back. A few minutes at most. You're to lock the doors and stay right here, in the house.' His red eyes glowed. This is my place! Only let them dare to… to… and…'

'Let who dare?' she whispered. 'E-Branch? Let them dare to what, Harry?'

'A few minutes,' he growled. 'I'll be back before you know it.'

6 Countdown to Hell

There were watchers.

Harry chose to exit from the Möbius Continuum at the same point as the last time he'd been there, in the shadow of the wall across the alley from Pound's place. And one of the watchers was right there!

Even in the moment he stepped from the Continuum into the 'real', physical world, Harry heard the plain-clothes man's gasp and knew someone was there in the shadows with him; knew, too, that even now this unknown someone would be reaching for his gun. One big difference between them was that Harry could see perfectly well in the dark. Another was that his adversary was only a man.

Reacting in a lightning-fast movement, Harry reached out to slap the man's weapon out of his hand… and saw what kind of a 'gun' it was which the other had produced from under his coat. A crossbow! He knocked it away anyway, sent it clattering on the cobbles, and held the esper by his throat against the wall.

The man was terrified. A prognosticator — a reader of future times — he had known that Harry would come here. That had been as far as he could see; but he'd also known that his own life-thread went on beyond this point. Which had seemed to mean that if there was trouble, Harry would be on the receiving end.

The Necroscope read these things right out of the esper's gibbering mind, and his voice was a clotted gurgle as he told him: 'Reading the future's a dangerous game. So you're going to live, are you? Well, maybe. But what as? A man — or a vampire?' He tilted his head a little on one side and smiled at the other through eyes burning like coals under a bellows' blast, and in the next moment stopped smiling and showed him his teeth.

The esper saw the gape — the impossible gape — of Harry's jaws, and gagged as the vampire's steel fingers tightened on his windpipe. In his mind he was screaming, Oh, Jesus! I'm dead — dead!

'You could be,' Harry told him. 'You could oh so easily be. It rather depends on how well we get on. Now tell me: who killed Darcy Clarke?'

The man, short and sturdy, balding and narrow-eyed, used both hands to try to loosen Harry's grip on his throat. It was useless. Turning purple, still he managed to shake his head, refusing to answer the Necroscope's question with anything but a gurgle. But Harry read it in his mind anyway.

Paxton! That vicious, slimy…

At that Harry's fury filled him to bursting. It would be so easy to just tighten his grip until this staggering shit's Adam's apple turned to mush in his hand… but that would be to punish him for what someone else had done. Also, it would be to pander to the monster raging inside him.

Instead he tossed the man away from him, took a deep breath and breathed a vampire mist. By the time the esper was able to prop himself on one elbow against the wall, choking and massaging his throat, the mist lay over the alley like a shroud and Harry had disappeared into it -

— Or rather through it, and through the Möbius Continuum into Johnny Pound's flat.

He knew he didn't have a lot of time; it depended how many men the Branch had up here — they could be coming through the main door of the building right now. And they'd be equipped with all the right gear, too. A crossbow is a hellishly ugly weapon, but a flamethrower is far worse!

Pound's flat was grimy as a pigsty and smelled just as bad. Harry moved through it without touching, thinking: Even my shoes will feel unclean.

First he checked the door. It was sturdy as hell, made of heavy old-fashioned oak hung on massive hinges, fitted with three locks and, on the inside, two large bolts. Obviously Johnny hadn't intended that anyone should break in; which sufficed to make Harry feel a little safer, too. He quickly moved on.

In the front room, before a small, grimy window overlooking the now quiet road, he paused beside a cheap writing desk. One drawer was half-open; Harry glimpsed a metallic sheen from inside but was distracted by the items on top of the desk: a creased, stained, huge-breasted Samantha Fox calendar, with today's date ringed in biro alongside some scribbled marginalia, and a hand-scrawled message on a sheet of A4 bearing the Frigis Express logo. The calendar didn't seem especially important… at least, not until Harry had read the message on the A4:

Johnny -

Tonight. A London run. Your 'lucky charm' truck, which I'll have loaded for you. Pick her up at the depot 11:40. It's for Parkinson's in Slough. They'll be dressing it for Heathrow Suppliers starting first thing in the morning, so we can't be late with this. Sorry for late notice. If you can't make it, let me know soonest.

The note was signed in some indecipherable scrawl, but Harry didn't need to know who had signed it. The date at the top was today's. Johnny had a London run tonight, leaving the Darlington depot at 11:40.

Now Harry looked at the calendar again. In the margin opposite the ringed date, Found had scribbled: 'London run! Good, 'cos I feel lucky and this could be my night. And I need to fuck inside a tit…'

Glancing at his watch, Harry saw that it was 11:30. Johnny was at the depot right now.

The Necroscope came to a decision there and then. His mad quarry used a Frigis Express truck (his 'lucky charm' truck) as a prop in his crazed games of sex, murder and necromancy; and so the truck should likewise feature in his punishment. Very well, tonight would be Johnny's last run. And now all Harry needed was an item from the lunatic's personal belongings.

He yanked the desk drawer open the rest of the way, and a half-dozen heavy metal tubes jumped in their velvet-lined compartments. Harry looked at them and thought, What the…? But as he carefully lifted one of the tubes out of the drawer he knew well enough what the…

The thing was a weapon, which Found himself must have made or had manufactured, for use on his victims. Or for use on one of them, anyway. A name had been painted with a small brush in black enamel on the shining metal: Penny. And Harry thought, This was what went into Penny, before Found went into her.

The weapon fitted Pamela Trotter's description perfectly. A section of steel tubing about an inch and a half internal diameter, one end was cut square and had a rubber sheath or hand-grip, and the other end was cut diagonally to a point. That was the cutting edge of the tool and its rim had been filed from the inside out to a razor's sharpness. The Necroscope already knew how — and why — such a hideous knife would be used. The very thought of it was sickening.

As a kid Harry had played in the deep snows of England's north-east coast. When he was quite small he'd love just to sit there in the piled snow with an old tin can, driving the open end plop into the cold, soft white bank. When you pulled the can out again it would be full of snow; short fat cylinders of snow, from which you could build castles like on the beach. Except unlike sandcastles, which melted away when the tide came in, these castles would last for days until the weather warmed up. But it wasn't the castles he pictured now but the perfectly circular holes which the can had used to leave in the snow. In his mind's eye he could see those holes even now… and they were crimson. And they weren't cut in snow.

Harry looked at the other steel-tubing knives. There were five more of them. Four were called after girls whose names he knew from the police files but didn't know personally, and the fifth carried the name Pamela. This bastard kept them like mementoes, like photographs of old flames! Harry could imagine him masturbating over them.

Six weapons in all, yes, but there were seven velvet-lined trays in the drawer. Found must have the seventh tube with him, except it wouldn't have a name yet.

Suddenly Harry's vampire awareness warned him of someone — in fact more than one — entering the main door of the house to creep in the communal corridor outside Pound's door. E-Branch? The police? Both? He sent out his thoughts to touch upon their minds. Another mind stared back at him for a moment, then withdrew in shock and horror. It had been a middling telepath; E-Branch again; but the others out there were police. Armed, of course. Heavily.

The Necroscope snarled a silent snarl and felt his face twisting out of its familiar contours. For a mad moment he considered standing and fighting; why, he could even win! But then he remembered his purpose in coming here — the job still to be finished — and conjured a Möbius door.

He went to the Frigis Express depot.

Emerging from the Möbius Continuum on to the grass verge where the Frigis works exit turned on to an Al South access road, he was in time to feel the blast of a big articulated truck as it sped by. The man at the wheel was just a shadow behind the glassy night sheen of his windscreen, but despite the fact that the legend on the side of the truck said only frigis express, still it spoke volumes. For one leg of the 'X' was missing where the paint had peeled away, making it look like eypress.

Johnny Pound's 'lucky charm' truck.

Harry came forward to the edge of the road, was trapped for a moment in sweeping headlight beams where a large, powerful car followed not too far behind the truck. Intense faces merely glanced at him as the car swept by.

But there was something about those faces. Harry reached out and touched their minds. Police! They were after Found; they still wanted to catch him red-handed, or if not that, at least on the point of picking up some poor unsuspecting girl. Fools! There was evidence enough in his flat to put him away for… not for long enough. Pamela was right: he'd probably go into a madhouse, and be out again in short order.

That other party back at Johnny's flat in Darlington: maybe they had broken in by now. Maybe they knew. So if Harry wanted the necromancer for himself, he was going to have to work fast.

But then he remembered Penny, alone in the house in Bonnyrig. He didn't know how long this was going to take. He could simply kill Found out of hand, of course, or cause him to be killed in any number of ways. Except he'd made a deal with Pamela Trotter, and he still wouldn't cheat on the dead. Also, Pound's punishment should fit the crime. But Penny shouldn't be left on her own… Not for too long… They'd killed Darcy Clarke, hadn't they?… Why the fuck was everything so complicated?

Harry felt the tension building… felt it swelling until the pressure inside was enormous… then gulpingly filled his lungs with the cool night air and took a firm, deliberate grip on himself. Penny had put him first; he must put her first; he took the Möbius route to Edinburgh.

She wasn't in the house!

Harry couldn't believe it. He'd told her to stay here, to wait for him. So where had she gone? He reached out with his telepathic mind -

— But which direction? At this hour of the night, where could she have gone? Why? For what reason? Or had she simply taken Trevor Jordan's advice and walked out on him?

He let his vampire awareness guide him, sent probes into the night, spreading outwards like ripples on the surface of a sentient mind-pool, seeking for Penny… and found others! Espers! Again!

He snarled at them, in their minds, and felt the shutters slam into place as they clamped down tight as limpets to rocks when the tide goes out. They'd been close but not too close, probably in Bonnyrig, some house they'd made their HQ. Harry passed them by, attempted to search further afield, came up against mental static that sizzled like bacon frying in his mind. It was E-Branch scrambling his sendings.

Damn all you mindspies! he cursed. I should get out and let you all find your own paths to Hell. But I should leave something behind me to make sure you get there, something to give you nightmares for ever!

He could do it, too, if he so desired, for he had the plague in him. This could be his legacy to a world and race which had forsaken him: a plague of vampires.

Physically, his own vampire was undeveloped, immature as yet; but its blood was his blood and his bite must surely be virulent. And at his command, the infinite vastness of the metaphysical Möbius Continuum. Why, he could plant vampires in every continent in the world — right now, tonight — if he wished it. And maybe then they would wish they'd left him the fuck alone!

He rushed out into his garden under the stars and the risen moon. It was night, his time. Ahhh, his time! But maybe in more ways than one. They were here for a reason, these espers. They could be coming for him right now, invisible under their shield of static.

'Come then, come!' he taunted them. 'And only see what's waiting for you!'

At the bottom of the garden, someone pushed the gate creakingly open. 'Harry?' Penny stepped into view and started up the path towards him.

'Penny?' The Necroscope reached out to her with his arms and with his mind, but her mind was a blur — or rather a mist — in which her psyche hid without even knowing it. Mind-smog!

Harry felt devastated, but he must hide it. Now she was a vampire, or would be, and now she was his thrall. It wasn't a crush any longer. And he wondered if it ever had been. After all, he had brought her back from the dead.

'What were you doing out in the night? I told you to wait.'

'But the night was so beautiful, and just like you I needed to think.' She let him fold her in his arms.

'What did you think about?' The night lured you. You felt the first fires racing in your veins. And tomorrow the sun will hurt your eyes, irritate your skin.

'I thought… maybe you didn't want to take me with you. Maybe you wouldn't.'

'You thought wrong. I will.' I have to, for to leave you in this world would be to sign your death warrant.

'But you don't love me.'

'Oh, but I do,' he lied. But it won't matter one way or the other, for you won't love me, either. Still, we'll have our lust.

'Harry, I'm frightened!'

Too late, too late! 'I don't want to leave you here now,' he told her. 'You'd better come with me.'

'But where?'

He took her into the house, ran through the rooms turning on all the lights, quickly returned to her. And he showed her Johnny's knife, with her name on it. She gasped and drew back from him. 'Can you imagine him?' he asked her, his voice dark as a winter night. 'Can you picture him looking at this and remembering your pain and his pleasure?'

She shuddered. 'I… I thought I'd forgotten. I've tried to forget.'

'You will forget.' He nodded. 'And so will I… when it's over. But I can't leave you here, and I have to finish it with him.'

'Will I see him?' She turned pale at the thought.

Harry nodded. 'Yes.' His scarlet eyes lit in a strange smile. 'Yes — and he will see you!'

'But you won't let him hurt me?'

'I promise.'

Then I'm ready…'

One hour earlier on Waverley station in Edinburgh, Trevor Jordan had boarded the overnight sleeper for London. He'd made no plans as such; tomorrow morning, early, he would probably give E-Branch a ring and see if he could sniff out which way the wind was blowing. And if it felt right he'd offer them his services again. They'd check him out (in the circumstances it was only to be expected) and of course they'd want to know all about his experiences with Harry Keogh. But he'd make sure that all of that took time, and by then Harry wouldn't be here any more. In the event he was still here, Jordan would cry off any work that went against him.

Not out of fear but respect, and out of gratitude… yes, and if he was truthful out of fear, too. Harry was Harry and a vampire. In that respect, anyone who didn't feel at least some trace of fear had to be an idiot.

The telepath had paid for a bed but couldn't sleep. There was just too much on his mind. He was a man back from the dead and he couldn't get used to it, probably never would. Not even a man who makes a full recovery from a desperate illness could feel like Jordan felt. For he had gone beyond illness — beyond life itself-and returned. And it was all down to Harry.

Unknown to Jordan, unknown even to Harry himself, was the fact that there was a lot more than that down to him. For the one thing Jordan hadn't taken into account was that Harry had been in his mind: the Necroscope had touched upon his mind — 'fingered' it, however briefly — but enough that he'd left his prints there. And no way to erase them.

To E-Branch — certainly to the two espers who had followed Jordan on to the train, one a spotter and the other a telepath — those prints took the form of a reeking mental mist called mind-smog. Of course, they couldn't probe too deeply, because Jordan was himself a quality telepath and he'd know it; indeed Gareth Scanlon, one of the two men who shadowed him, had once been Jordan's pupil, brought on by him until his own talent had matured and taken shape. Jordan would know his mind (not to mention his face, his voice) immediately. Which was why the two kept well away from him, boarded a carriage far down the train, on the other side of the buffet car, and sat for the first part of their journey with their hats on, hiding behind newspapers which they'd already read four or five times.

But Jordan never once headed in their direction or sent a single thought their way; he was satisfied just to sit in his sleeper compartment, listen to the clatter of the wheels on the tracks, and watch the night world roll by beyond his window. And be glad he was once more a part of that world, without once pausing to wonder for how long.

As the train slowed down a little for a viaduct crossing between Alnwick and Morpeth, Scanlon sat up straighter in his seat and closed his eyes in sudden, half-fearful concentration. Someone was trying to get through to him. But the thoughts were sharp, clean and entirely human, with nothing of vampire mind-smog about them. It was Millicent Cleary at the HQ in London, from where she, the Minister Responsible and the E-Branch Duty Officer were co-ordinating and running the show.

She kept it short: Gareth? Do you have a Sitrep?

Scanlon relaxed his screen of static and gave a brief situation report, finishing: He's in a sleeper, coming all the way into London.

Maybe not, she came back. It depends how things are going, but the Minister says we might pull the plug on all three of them very soon now.

What? Scanlon's concern was obvious; also his horror, that at any moment he and his colleague might be called upon to kill a man — indeed, to kill a former friend.

Clearly picked that up. A former friend, yes, but now a vampire. And a moment later: The Minister wants to know, is there a problem?

There wasn't, except: I mean, we are on a train, remember? We can't very well burn him on the bloody train!

The train will be stopping in Darlington, and we already have agents there. So be ready for the word. You may have to get off the train there and take Trevor… er, Jordan, with you. That's it for now. We'll get back to you.

Scanlon passed the message on to his companion, the spotter Alan Kellway, who was one of the Branch's more recent recruits. 'I didn't know Jordan all that well,' Kellway answered, 'and so have no problem that way. All I know is he was dead and now is alive — life of a sort — and that it isn't natural. So we'll only be restoring the natural order of things.'

'But I did know him.' Scanlon shrank down in his seat. 'He was my friend. It will be like murder!'

'A Pyrrhic killing, yes.' Kellway put it his way. 'But is it really? You have to remember: Harry Keogh, Jordan and their kind… they could murder our entire world!'

'Yes.' Scanlon nodded. 'That's what I keep telling myself. That's what I have to keep telling myself.'

In the Möbius Continuum, Johnny Pound's unthinkable knife was like a lodestone: it pointed in Pound's direction. Rather, Harry's locator talent pointed the knife, and he simply followed where it led.

Penny clung to him with her eyes closed; she had looked once, but that had been enough. The darkness of the Möbius Continuum seemed solid. That was because of the absence of everything material, the absence even of time. Where there is NOTHING, however, even thoughts have weight.

It's a kind of magic, she whispered, as much to herself as to anyone.

No, the Necroscope answered, but you can be forgiven for thinking it. After all, Pythagoras thought it, too. At which point, expert in the ways of the Möbius Continuum that he was, Harry sensed a cessation of motion and knew he'd found Found.

Forming a Möbius door and looking through, he saw a hedgerow paralleling a ribbon road that stretched into the distance straight as a ruler. Vehicles thundered by on the metalled surface, their lights strobing the bushes of the hedgerow into a flickering kaleidoscope of yellow, green and black. And even as Harry watched, so the Frigis Express truck whoofed by.

A short Möbius jump took them a mile farther down the road, where they exited inside a catwalk spanning the Al's multiple lane system. And a minute later Harry said: 'Here he comes.'

They gazed down through the walkway's windows, watched the Frigis Express truck thunder by beneath them to rumble on down the road. As its lights diminished and merged with those of the rest of the night traffic, Penny asked, 'What now?'

Harry shrugged and checked their location. 'Borough-bridge is a mile or two further south,' he said. 'Johnny might stop there or might not. In any case, I don't intend to monitor his progress mile by mile; but I do know that somewhere along the line he'll call a halt, probably at an all-night diner. That's his modus operandi, right? It's his venue, the hunting ground where he finds his victims; women, on their own, in the dead of night. Except… I don't have to tell you that, do I?'

Penny shuddered. 'No, you don't have to tell me that.'

They looked around. On one side of the road was a petrol station, on the other, a diner. Harry said, 'I'm happy now that I can find Johnny any time I want him. So let's take a break for a coffee, OK? And I can maybe explain something of how I want to play it.'

She nodded and even managed a shaky smile. 'OK.'

They headed along the walkway towards steps leading down to the cafeteria. People were coming up the steps, heading down to the petrol station and its car park. Before they could climb up to the walkway's level, Penny grabbed Harry's arm. 'Your eyes!' she hissed.

Harry put on his dark glasses, then took her hand. 'Lead me,' he said. 'You know, like I was a blind man?' It wasn't a bad idea. From then on, in the cafeteria where a handful of travellers were eating, people only looked at them once and quickly looked away.

It's a funny thing, Harry thought, but people don't much look at someone with an affliction. Or if they do, they look sideways. Hah! They'd jump sideways if they knew the nature of my affliction!

But they didn't.

Not all of them, anyway…

On the bank of the river some little way from Bonnyrig, Ben Trask and Geoffrey Paxton stood in the dark of the night under the moon and stars and listened to the gurgle of blackly swirling waters. They 'listened' for other things, too, but heard nothing. And they watched.

They watched the old house across the water — the house of the Necroscope, with all its lights ablaze — watched it for movement behind the open, ground-floor patio doors, for shadows falling on the fabric of the curtains in the upper windows, for any sign of life… or absence of life, undeath. And watching it they fingered their weapons: Trask his sub-machine-gun, with a magazine of thirty 9mm rounds seated firmly in its blued-steel housing, and Paxton his metal crossbow, loaded with a hardwood bolt under pressure sufficient to hammer through a man like a nail into softwood.

A mile away, on the road into Bonnyrig, two more E-Branch operatives sat in their car, waiting. They had small talents of their own but weren't telepaths; neither one of them had Ben Trask's experience, or Paxton's 'zeal'. But if it became necessary, certainly they would be able to do whatever must be done. Their car was equipped with a radio, tuned in on London HQ. At the moment their job was simply to relay messages, and act as back-up for the men up front. If Trask or Paxton called them, they could pick them up in little more than a minute. Which at least gave the men on the river bank a feeling of security; Paxton a little less than Trask, for he had been here before.

'Well?' Trask whispered now, taking the telepath's elbow. 'Is he in there or isn't he?'

Standing close to the very spot where Harry Keogh had tossed him into the river, Paxton was nervous. The Necroscope had warned him that next time… that there had better not be a next time. And now that time was here; and Trask's hand still gripped Paxton's arm just above the elbow. 'I don't know.' The telepath shook his head. 'But the house is tainted, for sure. Can't you feel it?'

'Oh, yes.' Trask nodded in the dark. 'Just looking at it, I can see it's not right. What about the girl?'

'An hour ago she was here, definitely,' the other answered. 'Her thoughts were clouded — mind-smog, yes — but readable to a degree. She's in thrall to him, no doubt about it. I thought Keogh was here, too — in fact I was sure he was, briefly — but now…' He shrugged. 'Telepathy with vampires is a very tricky business. To see without being seen, and to hear without being heard.'

Before Trask could answer him or make further comment, a tiny red light began to flash on his pocket walkie-talkie. He extended the aerial and depressed the incoming-call button. There sounded the customary wash of background static, and then the quiet, faintly tinny voice of Guy Teale, saying: 'Car here. How do you read me?'

'OK,' Trask answered him, soft and low. 'What's up?'

'We've had a call from HQ,' Teale came back. 'We're to move to final strike locations now, situate ourselves, from there on in maintain radio and ESP silence, and wait for the word.'

Trask frowned and said: 'We can ready ourselves, sure, but how will we be able to strike if our target isn't here? Ask HQ that, will you?'

Without pause Teale came back: 'HQ says that in the event there's no one in the house when they give the word, we remain in situ, stay alert and wait to see what happens.'

Trask's frown deepened. 'Ask them to repeat that, will you? With some of the blanks filled in?'

'I already did.' Teale's sigh was clearly audible. 'Before I even called you. As far as HQ knows, Keogh has the Sanderson girl with him, and he and she are on to the serial killer. Likewise we have people on Keogh and Found — within limits, that is — and also people on Trevor Jordan, on a night train bound for London. So, we'll let Keogh and/or the police settle with Found, then move on the Necroscope, the girl, and Jordan simultaneously, wherever they are at that time.'

Trask nodded. 'So if our people don't get Harry at their end — and if he escapes back here — we'll be waiting for him, right?'

'That's how I see it,' Teale answered.

Trask nodded. 'OK, secure the car and come on in on foot. Meet us at the old bridge, ready to cross in… ten minutes' time. Then we'll reorganize, split into two pairs and choose vantage points at the front and rear of the house. That's all for now. Be seeing you.'

He pressed the off button.

Paxton, nervously scanning all about in the darkness under the trees, said, 'Do you think Teale and Robinson will be OK working together? I mean, I'm sure we'll be fine together, but they don't strike me as having a hell of a lot of candlepower between them!'

'You're probably right.' Trask stared hard at him in the dark of the night, disliking everything that he saw and felt; especially the fact that every now and then he'd feel Paxton's talent tugging on the covers of his mind and trying to turn them back. 'So I'll team up with Teale, and you can take Robinson.'

Paxton turned more fully towards him and his eyes were slightly feral in fleeting moonlight. 'You don't want us to work together?'

'Paxton, let me put you right,' Trask told him. 'The only reason I wanted to work with you up here in the first place was to keep an eye on you. See, I think you're full of it, and it's leaking on your attitude. So you're right, I don't want us to work together. In fact, I'd rather work with raw shit!'

Paxton scowled and started to turn away, make tracks back up to the road. But Trask caught him by the arm and turned him around. 'Oh, and there's one other thing, Mr Hugely Talented Telepath. I've about ninety per cent had it with you trying to read my mind. When I'm a hundred per cent pissed you'll be the first to know it. Because after that Harry Keogh won't be the only one who ever tossed you in a river, right?'

Paxton was wise enough to say nothing. They returned to the road in silence, made their way to the old stone bridge over the river, and waited for Teale and Robinson to join them there…

Harry and Penny had finished their first coffees half an hour ago. Now they had seconds, which were going cold in their cups. Penny had tried a cream cake, too, from which she'd taken just one bite. She wasn't sure if it was the cake or her mood, but since nothing tasted right it was probably her mood. Every so often the Necroscope would reach into his inside pocket and take Johnny's hideous steel-tube weapon into the palm of his hand. Penny was aware each time he did it — aware that he was touching the instrument of her once-death — and she shuddered every time.

Finally, as Harry reached into his pocket yet again, she burst out: 'What if he doesn't stop? What if he drives clear down to London?'

Harry shrugged. 'If it looks like he will, then I'll let him get as… far… as…' He came to a jerky halt as his fingers touched the awful knife, and briefly closed his eyes behind their dark lenses. When he opened them again his voice had turned cold and taken on a cutting edge. 'But it won't come to that. He has stopped, now!'

'Do you know where?' She clutched his hand.

He shook his head. 'No. The only way to find out is to go there and see.'

'Oh my God!' she whispered. 'I'm going to see the man who murdered me!'

'More importantly,' Harry told her, 'he's going to see you. And he's going to wonder about you. If he reads the newspapers he'll know that Penny, one of the girls he killed, had a look-alike called, by some peculiar coincidence, Penny! But he'll have a hard time believing he's actually happened across her. I mean, there are coincidences and coincidences. If he has any brain at all, he'll find it a damned suspicious thing. It will worry him. That's what I want to do: worry him. I think Johnny deserves something of a harrowing time before we even-up the score more permanently.'

'We?' she repeated him. 'It… it feels like you're using me, Harry.'

'I suppose I am,' he answered her, allowing her to lead him out of the cafeteria into the night. 'Though not as hard as he did.' He quickly went on: 'And don't tell me that's not fair. Fair is like beauty, it lies in the eyes of the beholder. Also, I'm not asking you to do much, just to be there. There's someone else with a much larger part to play.'

'Maybe you're right,' she said, as he folded her in his arms, conjured a door and carried her over the threshold into the Möbius Continuum. About what's fair and what's beautiful, I mean. And it's a fact, I don't think there was anything of beauty in Johnny.

No, Harry answered, grimly, and nothing fair about him, either. But me, I'm fair. I only take an eye for an eye…

7 Nightmare Junction

Johnny had stopped at an all-services motorway watering-hole north of Newark. He'd chosen the A1(T) rather than the larger Ml because its service stations usually had richer pickings: not only long-distance truckers and motorists used its facilities but locals, too. It was Johnny's experience that when the town and village dance halls slowed down around midnight the young ones headed this way for a cheap motorway meal after a hard night's drinking, dancing and whatever. He'd stopped here before, but no luck as yet. Maybe tonight.

On clutch and air-brakes, he'd snorted and whoofed the big articulated truck around the tarmac until he'd found a place to park it where its nose sniffed the exit route. It was as well to be able to drive out of such places with as little trouble as possible. The place was on a major junction; the car park was busy and the lorry park half-empty; people came and went in small parties to and from the brightly-lit diner. Johnny's would be just one more face over a plate of chicken and chips and a pint of alcohol-free.

Inside, there'd been nothing much of a queue at the self-service bar; in a little while Johnny had settled at a table in a corner booth where he'd toyed with his food and casually looked the place over for a likely female face. There were several, but… they didn't fit his bill: too old, too drab, slack-faced, sharp-eyed, accompanied, or stone-cold sober. A few bright-eyed young things, yes, but all hanging on to flash boyfriends. Well, that's how it went. But there were plenty more places just like this between here and London. And you never could tell when your luck was going to change.

He remembered a time when, on a lonely stretch of road, this bird had roared by in a little red sports job. He'd bombed after her and forced her off the road into a ditch, then told her he was sorry and it was an accident — but he would be glad to give her a lift to the nearest I garage. Oh, he'd given her a lift, all right, but not to a garage. And then it had been her turn to give him a lift, a really good one, a real high. Johnny had been in a weird mood that night: after killing her he'd chopped a channel up under her jaw and fucked her in the throat. She'd felt it, of course, and how the dead bitch had yelped! Oh, she'd had cock in her throat before, but not coming from that direction.

Thinking about it had got him worked up. He must have one tonight. But not from this place. Maybe he should move on.

And that was when he saw… he saw… what the shit?

It wasn't possible but… he had to fight with his eyes to keep them from looking in her direction again. She was just over there; she'd just slid her backside on to a seat in a booth close by; there was a blind guy there, too — or a guy in dark glasses, anyway — but he didn't seem to be with her. She had a coffee, just a coffee, and she was the same as last time. She was exactly the same. And for a moment Johnny's mind whirled, for he could swear he'd had this one before!

How can that be? he asked himself. How can it be? And the answer was simple: it couldn't be. Unless this girl was the other's twin sister… or her double.'

And then he remembered reading something about that in the papers: how they thought the one he'd had in Edinburgh — Penny, that was her name — was someone else. But then she'd turned up alive: the spitting image of the one he'd screwed, murdered, and screwed again. Stranger still, the one who'd turned up had also been called Penny. Coincidence? Jesus, coincidence! But the biggest coincidence of them all: here she was, right now, right here. That is, unless he'd started seeing fucking things.

Slowly Johnny looked up from his food, through the acid-etched, fern-patterned glass dividers which loaned the booths a little privacy, until her face was directly in his line of vision. Maybe for a moment he caught her eye, but just for a moment, and then she looked away. The half-blind guy — the guy with the eye problem, anyway, who shared her booth — had his back to Johnny; but he didn't look much anyway, slumped over his mug of coffee like that. Her father, maybe?

No, her lover, Harry Keogh answered, but silently, speaking only to himself. Her vampire lover, you scumbag.

He had been into Pound's mind from the moment he and Penny had entered the place, and the mental cesspool in there was as rank as anything he'd ever come up against. Together with the necromancer's recognition of Penny as a former victim, or that victim's double, it strengthened Harry's resolve, confirmed his commitment. But as yet Pound's recognition of her hadn't produced the reaction Harry had expected. Curiosity, yes, but not fear. In a way, perhaps that was understandable.

For after all Found knew that the other Penny was dead; he knew that this couldn't be the girl he had violated. Still, his shock had been short-lived and Harry was disappointed. Also, he knew now that he was dealing with a very cool customer. Whether Found would be able to stay cool when confronted with what was on the cards for him… that was something else entirely.

Leaving Johnny's mind, the Necroscope leaned across the table a little toward Penny and quietly said, 'I can see how badly shaken you are. I can feel it, too. I'm sorry, Penny, but just try to stay calm. It won't be long now; when Found leaves I'll go after him; you'll stay here and wait for me. OK?'

She nodded and said, 'You seem very… well, cold about all of this, Harry.'

He shook his head. 'Just determined. But you see, Found is cold, which might give him an advantage if I allowed myself to get too heated.'

As he spoke, Harry saw two men enter the diner from the car park. They seemed ordinary enough but there was something about them. As they moved along the self-service bar collecting cold drinks, their eyes scanned the room, found the Necroscope and Penny in their booth, moved on. Harry went on to probe their minds — and his telepathic probe at once came up against a wall of mental static!

He withdrew immediately. At least one of these men was an esper, which meant E-Branch was closing in… on both Johnny Found and Harry Keogh! They probably wouldn't try anything in here — maybe not even in the darkness of the car park — but in any case Harry didn't want them on his trail. And they'd obviously figured out that if they followed Found they'd find the Necroscope, too. Now of all times he really couldn't afford this sort of complication.

Now, too, he remembered the car he'd seen tailing Pound's truck out of Darlington: an unmarked police car with… how many men aboard? Two or three? He'd thought they were all policemen but now knew better. Suddenly, coming from nowhere, he felt a growl rising in his throat. His Wamphyri side was reacting to the threat. Aware of Penny's gaze, he stifled the growl at once.

'Harry.' Her voice was concerned. 'You're very pale.'

Fury, my love. 'There's something I must do,' he told her. 'It will mean leaving you here — but only for a minute. You'll be OK?'

'In here, alone with him?' Her eyes were huge and round.

There are fifty people in here,' he answered. And two of them at least are pretty sharp characters. 'I promise I'll be right back.'

She touched his hand and nodded. Then I'll be OK.' But she avoided looking Pound's way.

Harry stood up, smiled a robot's smile at her and went out into the night.

At first, to anyone watching, it would appear that he'd been heading for the gents' toilets, but as he passed close to the swinging glass doors of the exit he turned sharply and pushed through them -

— And as soon as he was outside crouched down, breathed a mist and moved wraithlike between the cars ranked like soldiers on the hard-standing. His Wamphyri senses guiding him, he went straight to the unmarked police car and approached it from the rear. There was a driver, a plain-clothes policeman, with one elbow on the sill and a cigarette dangling from his lips where he sat silhouetted in a steel frame, looking out of his wound-down window into the darkness and breathing the mild night air.

Exuding fog, the Necroscope moved like a low-slung spider — performed a weirdly loping limbo — to draw silently alongside the car. And then he stood up.

The policeman's jaw fell open in a gasp of astonishment as a shadow, coming from nowhere, blocked out the stars and flowed over him; his cigarette flew as the Necroscope hit him once, hard enough to send him sprawling across the front passenger seat.

He was out like a light — or like his cigarette, which Harry ground under his heel. Then he reached inside the car and snapped the key in half in the ignition. So much for that: they wouldn't be following Johnny — or Harry — anywhere in this car. But to be doubly sure he took out Pound's steel-tube knife and drove it into the wall of a tyre until it hissed air and sagged down on to its rim. But as he began to straighten up he glanced into the back of the car and froze.

The Necroscope's eyes were attuned to the night, which was his element. He could see into the back of the car just as clearly as in broad daylight. And there on the back seat, a bulky, ugly, dark-snouted shape which Harry knew at once: a flamethrower. And on the floor back there, the blued-steel glitter of a pair of loaded crossbows. Loaded crossbows!

Harry hissed and crouched down into himself. They were ready for him, all of them. It must be coming soon. Perhaps sooner than he'd anticipated. Bastards! And he was the one who'd showed them how!

He attacked a second tyre and grunted his satisfaction as it collapsed into extinction, then moved round the car and did a third. Following which he paused and drew a ragged breath, and forced himself to be calm, calm…

He was trembling, but only trembling. No more hissing, snarling. Mere moments of violence, but they had acted as a safety valve on Harry's awful pressure. As his mist began to thin he sighed his relief, stood more humanly erect, put away the knife and headed back towards the diner…

Mere moments — less than two, three minutes at most — but more than sufficient time that the menace of Johnny Found had got to Penny, cancelling her former resolve to 'be OK'. For she had known from the moment Harry left the glass doors swinging behind him and disappeared into the night that she would not be OK, not in the same enclosed space as this monster, not with fifty or five hundred people around her.

Mere moments, yes, but enough time for Johnny to make up his mind that Penny would be The One. Obviously the guy with the dark glasses hadn't been with her after all, and now she was on her own. What was more, she was aware that Johnny was interested; he could feel her avoiding his eyes, even avoiding his thoughts, his existence. And suddenly he wondered: Does she know me? But how could she possibly know him? What the fuck was going on here, anyway?

He put aside his plate and placed his hands on the table, palms down, as if to push himself to his feet. And all the while he stared at Penny, willing her to look his way. She was looking his way, however obliquely, and saw him slowly rising. All the colour fled from her face as she too rose, slid out of her booth, backed away from him. She collided with a fat man with a tray and sent milk, hot food, bread rolls flying.

Johnny paced after her, smiling a deliberately feigned, surprised smile. It was as if he were saying 'What's wrong? Did I startle you?' Anyone watching would think: what on earth is wrong with that girl? Is she drunk, on drugs? So pale! And that nice young man looking so surprised, so astonished.

And that was the whole thing of it: Johnny Found did look like a 'nice young man'. When Harry Keogh had seen him, he'd been surprised that he didn't more nearly fit the bill. Medium height and blocky build; blond, shoulder-length hair; good, square teeth in a full mouth with a droopy, almost innocent smile… only his slightly sallow complexion marred the boy-next-door image. That and his eyes, which were dark and deep-sunken. And the fact that he lived in a pigsty. And that he was a coldblooded ravager of both living and dead flesh.

Penny blurted an apology to the gaping, spluttering fat man where he fingered his milk-soaked jacket, looked up and saw Johnny closing with her, turned and fled for the swing doors. Johnny glanced around at the dozen or so nearby patrons in their booths, shrugged and pulled a wry face, as if to say: 'A weirdo… nothing to do with me, folks!' and calmly walked after her.

But he was so intent on his act, and on following the girl into the night, that as he caught the still swinging door on the inswing and passed out through it he didn't see the two sharp-eyed men starting to their feet and coming after him.

Outside Penny turned frantically this way and that. A thin mist lay on the tarmac of the sprawling, tree-bordered car park; the headlights of vehicles on the nearby trunk road blinded her where they went scything by; she couldn't see Harry anywhere. But Johnny Found could see Penny, and he was right behind her.

She heard the crunch of gravel on the path leading back to the diner's door but didn't dare turn round. Of course, it could be anyone… but it could also be him. She felt rooted to the spot, all of her senses straining to identify what if anything was going on behind her, but utterly incapable of turning round and using the most obvious sense of all. And: God! she prayed. Please let it not be him!

But it was.

'Penny?' he said, sly and yet somehow wonderingly.

Now she turned, but with a sort of slow-motion jerkiness, like a puppet controlled by a spastic puppeteer. And there he was, bearing down on her, wearing a painted-on smile under eyes that were jet-black and flint-hard.

Her heart very nearly stopped; she wanted to cry out but could only choke; she almost fainted into his arms. He caught her up, looked quickly all around and saw no one. And: 'Mine!' he gurgled, glaring into her half-glazed, sideways-sliding eyes behind their fluttering lids. 'All Johnny's now, Penny!'

He wanted to ask her questions, right now, right here, but knew she wouldn't hear them. She was sliding away from him — away from the horror of him — into another world. Escaping into unconsciousness. That was a laugh. Why, no way she could escape from Johnny! Not even into death!

Here, in front of the diner, was the car park; behind it was the lorry park, and dividing the two a belt of trees with paths between. Johnny picked Penny up, hurried with her into the cover of the trees, carried her through them light as a child. Behind him the E-Branch spotter and a Special Branch Detective Inspector erupted from the diner, glanced this way and that, saw him hurrying into darkness.

They came running after him — and the Necroscope came loping after them.

Harry had heard her cry out. Not aloud, for she'd been too terrified to make any sound whatsoever. He'd heard her in his mind. She was his thrall, and she'd called to him. The call had come just as he was leaving the disabled police car, and at first he hadn't known what it was. But the vampire in him had known. He had seen Found carrying Penny into the screening trees, towards the lorry park, and he'd seen the two men from the diner running after him. All of them were moving quickly, but not as quick as Harry.

His lope was more wolf — more alien — than human, and he covered ground like the shadow of a fast-fleeting cloud under the moon. But as he entered the trees on a diagonal course calculated to intercept Johnny Found and his captive, he knew he'd made a mistake. The trees and the shrubs beneath them were an ornamental screen designed to separate the two car parks, and as such they were protected by high wire-mesh fences. Precious seconds were lost as Harry came up against a fence, cursed and conjured a Möbius door. In another moment he cleared the belt of trees and emerged on the perimeter of the hard-standing…

… Where a reeling, gagging figure collided with him and brought him to a halt! It was the esper. He knew Harry at once — sensed the awesome power of his metaphysical mind, that and the vampire in him — and threw up a hand to ward him off. The hand was bloody as the gaping wound in his cheek, where Johnny Found had torn a third of his face away.

Harry held him upright, snarled at him, then thrust him toward one of the paths through the trees. 'Go and get help, quickly, before you bleed to death!'

And as the esper choked out something inarticulate and staggered away, the Necroscope reached out with his vampire awareness to cover the entire park. He found three people at once: Penny, unconscious; Johnny Found, furious and bloody; and the policeman, dead where Pound's weapon had crashed through his ear to gouge into his brain.

Harry pinpointed their location, conjured a door and ran through it… and out again at the rear of the Frigis Express truck, where even now Johnny was slamming home the bolt on the roller door. At his feet, the policeman lay crumpled in a pool of his own blood, the left side of his face a raw red pulp.

The necromancer had taken the policeman's gun; he sensed Harry's presence, whirled, aimed and fired! Harry was coming head-on; he felt a colossal blow as the bullet smashed into his collarbone on the right side, spun him round and hurled him down on the tarmac.

Then, startled by the explosion and the flash, Johnny was fumbling the gun and dropping it. Stumbling across Harry, he kicked at him where he lay curled up in his pain; and running past the trailer toward his truck's cab, the madman raved, cursed and laughed all in one.

The pain in Harry's shoulder was a living thing that took hold of his flesh with white-hot pincers and twisted it, causing him to moan his agony. And he thought: Bastard thing in my blood, my mind! Your fault, you berserk, headlong, idiot! Very well, you've caused me to be hurt — now heal me!

Found was in his cab, starting up and revving the engine. Air-brakes hissed and the reversing lights blazed crimson to match Harry's eyes or the jelly coagulating on the side of the dead policeman's head. Racked by pain, the Necroscope saw the huge bulk of the truck jerk, shudder and start backing up; in another moment a pair of its twinned wheels skidded viciously, then gripped and dragged the policeman's body under. Blood and guts gushed as the wheels lifted up barely an inch and the weight of the truck squeezed the corpse's innards like toothpaste from a tube.

He's lucky he's dead! Harry dazedly, unthinkingly thought. It's something he wouldn't want to happen while he was still alive! They were instinctive thoughts, shocked out of him by the squelching eruption of brains and shit and flailing guts, but they were also deadspeak and the policeman heard him.

Exhaust gases belched in Harry's face where he rolled desperately from the path of the reversing truck; the scarlet-dripping wheels missed him by inches; but through all the roar and the stink and the mess on the tarmac he heard and was riveted by the policeman's answer:

But I did feel it! And God, it was like dying twice! And Harry's blood — even his blood — froze as he remembered who was driving the truck: Johnny Found, necromancer, whose actions his victims could feel even as the teeming dead had once felt Dragosani's!

Then the air-brakes hissed again and the truck jerked to a halt, shuddered, started forward, turned and rumbled away towards the exit. Johnny Found was making his escape, with Penny aboard. But: No, you fucking don't! Harry fixed the truck's location in his mind, got to his knees, toppled through a Möbius door and out again into the refrigerated trailer. It was dark in there but that was nothing to the Necroscope. He saw Penny, crawled to her, put his left hand under her head and drew it into his lap. She opened her eyes and looked into his where they blazed.

'Harry, I… I didn't stay in the diner,' she whispered.

'I know,' he growled. 'Did he hurt you?'

'No.' She shook her head, but weakly, 'I… I think I just fainted.'

Harry had no time to waste. Not now, for his blood was up. Literally! 'Cling to me,' he said.

She did as she was told and Harry let the Möbius equations roll across the computer screen of his mind. One moment later and Penny felt the awesome immensity of the Möbius Continuum, and in the next gravity returned where they fell prone on to Harry's bed in the house outside Bonnyrig. 'This time stay here!' he told her. And before she could even sit up he was gone again…

In the operations room at E-Branch HQ, Millicent Cleary and the Minister Responsible sat with David Chung, who was also the Duty Officer, at one end of a large desk. The desk was equipped with a radio receiver, a radio telephone, standard telephones, blown-up Ordnance Survey maps of England under illuminated plastic, and a tray containing various small items of property belonging to Branch agents in the field. Spotlights in the ceiling were concentrated on the desk, turning it and its immediate surroundings into an island of light in the large room's comparative darkness.

Millicent Cleary had just a moment ago received a brief telepathic message from Paxton at the house near Bonnyrig, stating that the assault team was in position. Keogh and the girl had been back, briefly, but Paxton was sure that the Necroscope was no longer in the house. Similarly Frank Robinson, the spotter who was Paxton's partner on the job, believed one of the two was still there; since there was no noticeable disturbance of the psychic 'ether', he would guess it was the girl. Keogh must have used the Möbius Continuum to drop her off at the house before moving on. If there'd been any indication that the Necroscope himself was still in there, then the team would have maintained ESP silence. But since he wasn't… Paxton was eager to learn what was happening.

Cleary passed the mind-message on and the Minister Responsible gave a snort. 'I've come to the conclusion that you're right about Paxton,' he said. 'All of you. I get the feeling he won't be satisfied until he's running the world!'

Cleary frowned and nodded. 'Ruining it, you mean!' she said, sourly; then quickly added, 'Er… sir! But we are right, and you don't have to be psychic to know it. He's a menace. We're lucky Ben Trask is up there keeping an eye on him. Do you want me to tell him anything?'

The Minister looked at her — also at Chung where he busied himself touching and concentrating on his many contact sigils in their tray, fathoming the whereabouts, mood and feelings of the agents in the field — and mentally reviewed the situation:

The telepath Trevor Jordan (who by all rights and natural laws should be a small heap of ashes in a vase), was on a night train heading for London via Darlington. Two E-Branch agents were on the same train and didn't anticipate too much trouble, even though it was a pretty safe bet that Jordan was a vampire. They were equipped with powerful automatic weapons, and one of them had a small but deadly crossbow. Another man was on his way to the mainline station in Darlington to give them a hand. He had a car, and in its boot a flamethrower.

Penny Sanderson, also a resurrected vampire, was probably in Keogh's house outside Bonnyrig. The agents up there were (again probably) as strong a team of espers as E-Branch could throw together, which they would need to be if or when Keogh rejoined the party. For the odds were that sooner or later he'd go back there for the girl.

As for the Necroscope himself: he could be quite literally anywhere, but he was probably tracking Johnny Found. His reasons for doing so were all his own, but the Sanderson girl had been one of Pound's victims. Vengeance? Why not? It seemed the Wamphyri had always been big on revenge.

So, if E-Branch moved now, two of the three targets were good as dead (the Minister recoiled for a moment, shocked by the necessarily cold efficiency of his own thoughts) but Keogh would still remain the big question mark, the pivot on which everything else turned. And it would be to everyone's advantage — literally everyone's, everywhere — if the Necroscope could be taken out at the same time as the others.

'Sir?' The girl was still waiting for an answer.

The Minister opened his mouth to speak, but at that moment David Chung held up a hand and said, 'Hold it!' Cleary and the Minister looked at the locator; his other hand was resting on a Zippo cigarette lighter, the longtime property of Paul Garvey, a telepath working with the police out of Darlington. That hand was steady, the tips of Chung's long fingers motionless where they touched the cold metal. But the hand he held up was trembling, violently.

Suddenly he snatched back his hand from the tray, stepped back a little from the desk. In another moment he'd recovered himself, came forward again and said: 'Garvey has been hurt! I don't know how, but it's serious…' He closed his eyes and his hand hovered a moment over the maps beneath their clear plastic laminate.

As the small Chinaman's hand came down to cover a section of the Al north of Newark, the Minister turned to Cleary. 'Can you get hold of Garvey?'

'I've worked with him, lots.' She was breathless. 'Let me try.'

She closed her eyes and concentrated on mental pictures of her fellow esper, and got him at once. Garvey was in fact sending at that very moment. But his signal and message were weak, garbled, distorted by his pain… which Cleary immediately became heir to! She gasped and staggered, and for a second lost him. Then she picked him up again, but barely in time before he blacked out and his telepathic thoughts flew into shards in her mind. The rush of psychic sendings had not been without images, however, which she'd received even as he was going under.

She turned to the Minister and her features were drawn, bloodless. 'Paul's face,' she said. 'It's ruined! His cheek is hanging in tatters. But there's a doctor with him. They're in some sort of… motorway cafe? I think he was attacked by Johnny Found — but the Necroscope was also there. And a policeman is dead!'

The Minister grabbed her wrist, steadied her. 'A policeman, dead? And Keogh was there? You're sure?'

She nodded, gulped. 'It was in Paul's mind: a picture of a… a bloody hole in a policeman's head. And another of Harry, with eyes like red lamps burning in his face!'

Chung said, 'Garvey's somewhere here,' and he pointed at the map. 'On the Al.'

The Minister took a deep breath, nodded and said, This is it: it's all coming to a head, right now. Keogh might have guessed it all along but by now he must know we're after him, definitely. So while all three of these… these creatures, are in different locations — from which two of them at least can't escape — now has to be the best time to move on them.' He turned to the girl. 'Miss Cleary, er, Millicent? Is Paxton still waiting? Get back on to him and tell him to move in now, at once. Then speak to Scanlon and tell him the same thing.' He turned to Chung. 'And David — '

But the locator was already busy on the radio, speaking to people in Darlington.

Meanwhile:

By the time Johnny Pound's thundering Frigis Express truck took the curves on the roundabout at the junction of the Al and A46 outside Newark, he was much calmer and showing a lot of skill and driving discipline. Had there been a police patrol car stationed at the roundabout, its officers probably wouldn't look twice at him.

There was no patrol car, however. Just Harry Keogh.

Using Pound's knife, the Necroscope had followed the truck's progress in a series of short Möbius jumps, waiting for his quarry to slow down a little before attempting what would have to be an extremely accurate jump on to a moving object — directly into Pound's cab! Also, it must be accomplished as smoothly as possible, so as not to jar Harry's badly shattered collarbone. The pain of that alone would have left any other man writhing on his back or entirely unconscious. But Harry wasn't any other man. Indeed, with every passing moment he was a little less a man and more a monster, albeit one with a human soul.

And so, as the necromancer straightened up his truck off the roundabout and back on to the Al, Harry emerged from the eternal darkness of the Möbius Continuum into the empty seat on his left. At first Found didn't see him, or if he did he considered him a shadow in the corner of his eye. And Harry sat still and quiet in the very corner of the cab, pressed against the door with his face and upper body turned towards the driver. He kept his eyes three-quarters shuttered, studying Johnny's face, which had seemed previously scarcely to match up with any of the descriptions given him by the girls, but which he now saw to be very terrible indeed.

As for Johnny himself: he knew that it was all over. Too many people had seen him tonight, in the diner, the car park, with or close to the girl. Indeed, it seemed to him that he'd been set up. They had traced him, then trapped him with a girl who was the image of one of his victims. And he had fallen for it. Well, two of the bastards at least had paid for it, and the girl would pay, too, when he climbed into the trailer with her, chopped a passage through the orbit of her left eye and fucked her brain!

These were his thoughts, which Harry, looking directly at him, read as clearly as — more clearly than — the pages of a book. And if before there had been any doubt at all in the Necroscope's mind that his intended course of action was the right one, these were also the thoughts which dispelled it. Now, as Johnny dwelled more intimately on the pleasures he intended taking with or from the girl, Harry very quietly spoke up and said: 'None of those things will happen, for the girl isn't in the trailer. I freed her. As I intend freeing all of the dead. From their terror, Johnny. From your tyranny.'

Pound's jaw had fallen open at the first word. There was a trickle of saliva, slime, froth, in the left-hand corner of his mouth, which now ran down under his lip and into the dimple of his chin. He said 'Who — ?' and his coal-black eyes slowly slid to the left in their deep sockets… then stood out like inkblots on the gaunt parchment which until a moment ago had been the flushed, bloated flesh of his face.

'You're a goner, Johnny,' Harry told him, and opened his furnace eyes to reflect ruddily on the other's paralysed, astonished features.

But Pound's paralysis was short-lived, and the rest of it — his almost immediate response — was all instinct, so that not even the Necroscope could have seen it coming. 'What?' he gurgled, taking his left hand from the wheel and reaching up behind his head for a meat-hook where it hung from the cab's frame. 'A goner? Well, one of us is, that's for sure!'

Harry's plan had been simple: as Found attacked him, he'd conjure a Möbius door and wrestle him through it. But it was difficult enough just to take hold of a man in the cab of a truck, let alone when he was wielding a meat-hook.

Johnny had seen the huge bloodstain on Harry's jacket and recognized him as the one he'd shot back in the diner's vehicle park. How he came to be in the cab was something else, but he surely wouldn't be much good for anything with a gaping hole in his shoulder. And even less good when Johnny was finished with him. 'Whoever you are,' he grunted, swinging the hook, 'you're dead fucking meat!'

The blow was awkward and left-handed, but still Harry couldn't avoid it. He ducked down a little and the question mark of shining metal passed over his right shoulder, swooped down on him and caught in the hole which the bullet had torn out of his back. He gasped his renewed agony as Found yanked him towards him and glared into his face. Then -

— Using Harry as a counterweight, the necromancer lifted his left leg, reached it across Harry's knees and kicked open the cab door. And as the truck careened down the twin lanes he kicked again, this time at Harry himself, and simultaneously released his hold on the meat-hook.

Sliding free of his seat into the rush of night air, the Necroscope made a desperate grab for the wildly swinging door. Luckily the window was down; as he looped his arms through the frame, so his feet slammed down on to the running board. Johnny could no longer reach him without letting go of the wheel, but he could at least try to shake him loose.

Heedless of other vehicles, the maniac threw his huge truck this way and that across the lanes, and Harry hung on like grim death until the thought suddenly occurred. Why not a big door? Why not the biggest bloody door you could ever imagine?

On his left and almost directly under his skidding, skittering feet, a car was sideswiped and sent spinning, crashing through the roadside barrier in a shriek of ruptured metal. It smashed into the embankment nose first and exploded like a bomb. But the big truck rushed on and left people frying and dying in its wake, and in the cab Johnny fuelled himself with their pain and knew that even dead they would hear his crazy laughter.

Enough! Harry thought, and conjured his giant door — on the road directly in front of the truck.

The rumble and thunder and rocking violence of the vehicle died away in a moment as it plunged through the Möbius door into darkness absolute; likewise the mad laughter of Johnny Found, shut off as he delivered a single gonging thought into the aweseome Möbius Continuum: WHAT?

What indeed?

The beam of his headlights went on for ever, cutting a tunnel through infinity. But apart from the headlight beams and the truck where its mass surrounded him, there was nothing whatsoever. No road, no sound, no sensation of motion, nothing.

WHAAAAT!? Johnny screamed again, deafeningly, in both his and the Necroscope's mind.

But: No good shouting now, Johnny, Harry told him, hanging on the door and guiding the truck, aiming it like a missile to its final destination. Like I said, you're a goner. And we're very nearly there. Welcome to hell!

Johnny let go of the wheel and sprawled across the wide seat, reaching for the Necroscope where he clung to the door of the cab. But too late; they were there; Harry conjured another door in front of the truck and pushed himself free, slowing his motion to an abrupt halt. And the truck went rushing on -

— Out of the Möbius Continuum to emerge inches over the surface of a narrow road. It crashed down, bounced, rocked and roared; and as its free-spinning tyres found purchase on the tarmac, so it rocketed forward. Johnny screamed as he saw the sharp bend coming up where the road skirted a long, high wall of ivy-clad stone. He made a desperate grab for the steering wheel, but the truck had already mounted the kerb. It shot across a narrow strip of grass, tore through a mass of night-black shrubbery, slammed into the wall… and stopped.

Stopped dead.

… But not Johnny!

As the truck and its trailer concertinaed — as the wall cracked and sent stone debris flying — as massive petrol tanks shattered and showered fuel on to hot, tortured metal, turning the truck into a blazing inferno — so Johnny was ripped out of his driver's seat and hurled through the windscreen. Bones in his left arm and shoulder broke where, pinwheeling, he hit the top of the wall before crushing down on to something hard far on the other side. There was pain, more pain than he'd ever known; and then, apart from flickering firelight from beyond the wall, and a booming, whooshing explosion as the emergency tank blew, there was a deafening silence. The silence of mental concentration, of knowing even through waves of agony that someone — several pitiless someones — were watching him.

He cranked his neck up an inch from where sharp gravel chips stuck to the tattered mess of his face, and saw Harry Keogh standing there, looking down on him. And behind the red-eyed Necroscope there were other — people? Things, anyway — which Johnny knew should never be. They came (crawled, staggered, crumbled) forward, and one of them was or had once been a girl. Johnny backed off, pushing with his raw hands, sliding on his belly and his knees, skidding in the bloodied gravel until he collided with something hard, which brought him up short. He somehow turned his head and looked back, and saw what had stopped him: a headstone.

'A… a… fucking graveyard!' he gasped.

And Harry Keogh said, 'End of the road, Johnny.'

Pamela Trotter said, You kept your promise, Harry. And he nodded.

And Johnny Found, Necromancer, knew what had passed between them. 'No!' he gasped. Then screamed: 'Noooooooo!'

He would get to his feet. Even broken, shattered, cut to ribbons, he would flee from the hell of it. But Pamela's dead friends fell or flopped on him and bore him down, and a hand that shed rotting flesh and maggots stoppered his mouth. Then she came to him and searched among his rags, until she found his new knife. And close up like that — badly gone into corruption though she was, even with the flesh beginning to slough from her face — still he knew her.

You remember that good time we had? she said. You didn't even say thanks, Johnny, and you didn't leave me anything to remember you by. Well, now I think it's time I had me a small memento. Or even a big one, eh? Something I can take back down into the earth with me, right? She showed him his own knife and smiled at him, and her teeth were long where the blackened gums had shrivelled back from them.

Harry turned away and shut out the sight; shut out Pound's silent, frenzied shrieking, too, from his mind. But to Pamela he said, 'Make sure you kill him.'

Except: Too late! She was weeping her frustration. Or rather, too soon! Damn the bastard, Harry, but he's already died on me!

Harry sighed his relief and thought, Just as well. She heard him and a moment later agreed:

Yes, I suppose it is. Shit, I didn't want to dirty my hands on this filth anyway!

And now Pound's deadspeak reached out to both of them, to Harry and to Pamela. What… is this? Where… am I? Who… is it out there?

Neither one of them answered him, but the sheer weight of Harry's presence impressed itself on Pound's mind like a light shining in through the stretched membrane of shuttered eyelids. He knew that Harry was there, and that he was special. It's you, right? he said. The guy with the dark glasses, with some kind of magic. You brought me here with your magic, right?

Harry knew that Pamela would probably never speak to Johnny Found, neither Pamela nor any other of the outraged Great Majority. Instead of taunting the necromancer, they'd merely shun him, lock him up or out, like a leper. So maybe Harry shouldn't speak to him either but simply go away. And perhaps that would be the most merciful thing to do.

Except… Harry had a less than merciful thing inside him, which now caused him to speak up.

You had the same magic, Johnny, he said. Or you could have had. You could speak to the dead — could have trained yourself, as I did, to converse with them and befriend them — but no, you chose to torture them instead.

Found was quick to catch on. So now I'm one of them, right? I'm dead and you did it to me. But just answer me this: why?

Harry could have explained: that he'd needed to focus his Wamphyri passions on something — to have something to let them loose on — rather than people who were previously his friends; which was to say E-Branch and the world in general. He could have explained, but didn't. For his vampire wouldn't let him. Found had been the cold, cruel, uncaring one in life; death should be a cold, cruel place, too. And just as uncaring. An eye for an eye.

Why did I kill you? Harry shrugged, began to turn away.

Hey, fuckface! Found shouted after him, defiant, furious even in death. That doesn't cut it. You had your reasons, sure enough. Because of the dead? Shit! Who gives a fuck for the dead? So come on, tell me… why?

And so — coldly, cruelly and uncaringly — Harry told him. You're right, he said. No one gives a fuck for the dead. And you, Johnny, you're dead. You want to know why? And again he shrugged. Well, why the fuck not?

8 The Vampire Killers

Even though the Great Majority no longer trusted him, Harry had always respected them. He thanked Pamela and those of her friends who had assisted in bringing Johnny Found to justice; and as they commenced their arduous return to what would now be their final resting places, so the Necroscope employed his metaphysical mind's fantastic equations and materialized a Möbius door. But in the moment before he stepped through it…

… An agonized voice — not deadspeak but telepathy, which even as he received it changed to deadspeak — reached out to him from a deserted stockyard not far from the mainline station in Darlington. It was Trevor Jordan: alive at first, then dead, turning to fused flesh, bubbling blood and charred, blackened bone as a squad of former E-Branch colleagues torched him to sticky, steaming cinders!

Trevor! Harry gasped, his own agony almost as great as the telepath's as he received the full, searing impact of his final seconds. Trevor, I'm coming — right now — just keep talking and I'll find -

No! Jordan cut him off, as all the pain of a life at its termination faded away and death's cool darkness crashed over him, laving him like an ocean wave. No, Harry, don't… don't come here. They're expecting you, and believe me they have the right gear. And anyway, you have no time. The girl, Harry, the girl!

The Necroscope understood. Of course: Penny.

The Branch had been closing in on him; they had closed in on Jordan; they would close in on Penny — and they'd be doing it even now!

Trevor! Harry was torn — felt himself riven — two ways: a secondary agony, of frustration and indecision. But Jordan was right. No one should be put to such an agonizing death, and certainly not an innocent. Jordan had been just such a one, and so was she. No matter what name anyone gave her now, or what she would be tomorrow, tonight she was an innocent.

You can't help me, Harry, Jordan told him, trying to make it easier for him. Not this time. You can only jeopardize your own safety — and Penny's. But it's OK, it's OK. I lived twice, which was enough. And dying twice was… that was too much. I don't need any more.

In the Möbius Continuum, Harry still felt himself dragged apart, pulled two ways. He moaned his horror — and his anger — as he deliberately shut Jordan's deadspeak thoughts out of his mind. Later, maybe later, he'd have time to thank him for the warning. But as for now -

— Bonnyrig.

He emerged along the river bank, well away from the house, emerged to a darkness shot with the crimson of his fury. Wamphyri fury! The thing within held sway; its awareness washed out from the Necroscope like human — like inhuman — radar, scanning the house standing in darkness. Except… when Harry left here the lights were ablaze!

Harry's telepathy was carried on his vampire probe. In the house, five people — five warm beings full of blood — five clever, thinking creatures, and four of them possessed of wild, weird talents. But nothing so weird as Harry's. His metaphysical mind touched upon their minds, but guardedly, so that they wouldn't suspect.

Penny first, terrified for her life, but as yet unharmed. Then Guy Teale, an as yet undeveloped seer, given on occasion to glimpsing the future, which Harry well knew was an unwieldy, unforgiving talent at best. And Frank Robinson, a spotter with the ability to recognize another esper on sight, or even in close proximity (his mind flinched a little when Harry touched it, but not enough that the Necroscope's presence was revealed; Robinson's talent, too, was as yet embryonic). But then… ah, then there was Ben Trask. A sad thing: Harry had hoped there'd be no old friends here, but here was Ben. And finally -

— Paxton!

Paxton the mind-flea, the previously unreachable itch, a vampire no less than Harry himself, who scorned the blood of others for the secret juices of their minds, their very thoughts. And indeed Paxton was something else: keen beyond the call of duty, zealous to a fault, vicious as the crossbow he even now held on Penny Sanderson in the Necroscope's bedroom. So that quick as Harry was to withdraw his probe, still he wasn't quick enough and Paxton knew he was there.

The telepath at once narrowed his eyes and quietly, with a shiver in his voice, called downstairs: 'He's close! He's coming!'

In the spacious front room of the house, which had served mainly as Harry's study — whose French windows looked out over a garden descending in shallow terraces to a high wall and the river bank beyond — Ben Trask and Guy Teale received Paxton's hushed warning and acknowledged it with tight-lipped glances and cramped, edgy movements. Moon and starlight were their only sources of illumination, which in itself was a mistake on their part. Their eyes had needed to adjust to the darkness, and even now worked inefficiently in the room's gloom. But the Necroscope's every sense was already adjusted; the night was his element.

It was the same for those upstairs as for Trask and Teale: their only light was that of the moon, creeping into Harry's bedroom through a window with the curtains thrown back. But downstairs: Teale felt Harry's presence, touched Ben Trask's elbow and husked, 'Paxton's right. He's close. And my God, I suddenly realize what we're doing here! Ben, what if he comes here, right to this room?'

'You do nothing,' Trask answered, gruffly. 'You hold that crossbow on him and do nothing. You give me a chance to talk to him, is all. But if I don't get that chance, or if you yourself are threatened, then you shoot — and you shoot for real! The heart. Is that understood?'

It was.

'Now be quiet. Watch. And listen.'

Outside in the garden, mist crawled through the gate in the wall where it hung on rusted hinges. Milky tendrils covered the lower terraces and lapped along the paths. And Trask knew well enough what that meant.

Harry made a Möbius jump from the river bank beyond the gate and emerged with his back to the wall of the house, just to one side of the open French windows. He listened and could hear the breathing of the two men in the room, could feel their very heartbeats. One of them was Ben Trask, but Penny wasn't with them. She was upstairs… and so was Paxton.

'Jesus!' Teale panted, the short hairs rising at the back of his neck. 'He's here! I know he is! And I've just seen a lot of trouble, a whole load of pain, for one of us.'

Trask cocked his SMG. He took two paces out through the French windows and stood ankle-deep in mist, looking this way and that about the night garden. But he failed to look up. He backed into the room and said, Trouble? Pain? For me? You? Who for, for fuck's sake?'

'Paxton!' Teale hissed. 'For Paxton!'

Trask turned horrified eyes to the ceiling. Paxton, Robinson and the girl were upstairs; Harry owed Paxton one, maybe several, and that vicious little bastard was holding his woman up there. Trask had worked out, with entirely human logic, that like any ordinary adversary the Necroscope would enter the downstairs rooms first; which was the main reason he'd sent Paxton upstairs: to keep Harry safe, for a little while anyway. Long enough that Trask could maybe talk to him and make sure he got whatever breaks were due him. But Harry wasn't any ordinary adversary and Trask might have guessed he wouldn't work that way. He'd work his way, which was unique. But Paxton was in charge up there, and Robinson had a bloody flamethrower!

'Upstairs!' Trask gasped. 'Let's go — now!'

Harry, too, had decided that it was time. Upside down above the high window of his bedroom, he used the great webbed sucker discs of his hands to cling to the pitted wall of the house and lowered his head to look in. A cloud scudding over the moon obscured the small shadow which his head cast. He glanced inside for a moment only, then withdrew. But adding together what he saw and the thoughts of those inside, he now had a complete picture. And before anyone or thing could move or do anything to change that picture, he acted.

He relaxed his hold on the wall, conjured a door and fell through it -

— Into the bedroom.

Robinson knew it at once. 'He's here!' the spotter yelped, spinning on his heel, jumping and gyrating, trying to aim the hot nozzle of his flamethrower in every direction at the same time but seeing and aiming at nothing.

Paxton knew it was true; he could actually feel the Necroscope's mind touching his own like an oozing slug — as close as that — but inside the room nothing seemed to have changed. And from downstairs the voices of Trask and Teale were hoarse where the two came running, thundering through the house and up the stairs, shouting their warnings.

'Where?' Paxton's voice was a screech of terror. 'Where is the bastard?'

He and Robinson faced each other. Paxton looked down the glowing muzzle of Robinson's flamethrower into the flicker of its pilot light, and Robinson stared at the business end of Paxton's crossbow. They both reached for the light switch.

Penny was in the bed, naked, a sheet pulled up under her chin, around her neck… and Harry was under the sheet with her where he'd materialized. Not knowing what was happening she felt his arms go around her — felt his huge webbed discs restructuring themselves into hands once more — and screamed!

Paxton read her mind; Robinson finally pinpointed Harry's vast ESP talent; as the room came alive with electric light, both men turned towards the bed and triggered their weapons. But Harry had already conjured a door — directly under himself and the girl, so that they tumbled through it and apparently through the bed itself. As they went he dragged the bedsheet after them. In the Möbius Continuum Penny opened her eyes, then gasped and screwed them shut again. But now that she knew who had her it was OK.

Harry took her to a safe place, wrapped the sheet around her, grated, 'Stay here, be quiet, wait!' And as she sat down with a breathless bump in the shade of a wind-carved tree on a deserted, midday, Australian beach, so he returned to the house.

He had to go back, for he'd been challenged.

Paxton had challenged him — ignored his warnings and challenged him — and Harry's vampire was furious!

In an upstairs room in the house outside Bonnyrig, the Necroscope's bed roared up in fire and smoke, with Paxton and Robinson dancing like maniacs around it, trying to damp down the flames. But already they knew that Harry and the girl had escaped. Trask and Teale came crashing through the door, and the latter took one look, turned white and backed right out of the room again. Trask went after him and grasped his arm. 'What did you see?'

Teale's mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water. 'He… he's coming back again!' he finally gasped. 'And he's mad as hell!'

Trask stuck his head back inside the smoke-filled bedroom. 'Paxton, Robinson — out of there, now!'

'But the house is burning!' Robinson yelled.

That's right,' Trask shouted back, 'and all the way to the ground! We'll torch it downstairs — heavily, every room — raze the place. It's one refuge he won't be able to use again.' And to himself: Sorry, Harry, but that's the way of it.

Except it wasn't entirely to himself, for the Necroscope was listening, too. Listening with his mind — and watching with his scarlet eyes — from across the river, where a minute later he heard the gouting roar of the flamethrower and saw the fire spreading through all the downstairs rooms.

And: My place, Harry thought, and there it goes in flames. This is the end of it. There's nothing to keep me here now.

In Harry's downstairs study Paxton turned on Trask and his face was livid. 'Just what is it you're trying to do?' he demanded. 'You know he won't come into a burning house. Teale says Keogh wants me, and Robinson reckons he's close — but you, you're holding him off. He has to come to us before we can kill the bastard! Or maybe that's it. Maybe you don't want him killed, right?'

Trask grabbed him by the front of his jacket and almost lifted him off his feet. 'You shithead!' He dragged him into the garden, out of the blazing room. 'You scumbag! No, I don't want Harry killed, for he was my friend. Still, I'd do it if I had to. But that's OK for in fact I don't think we can kill him. Not you and me or an army like us. You ask why I'm warning him off? For you, Paxton, for you!'

'For me?' The other struggled free, loaded his crossbow.

'Damned right,' Trask snarled. 'For while you can't kill Harry Keogh, you'd better fucking believe he can kill you!'

The downstairs rooms of Harry's house were a red and yellow inferno now, and smoke had started to pour from the upper windows and ancient gables. In the garden, as the glass in the French windows surrendered to the heat and began to shatter, the four E-Branch agents backed away. Paxton, suddenly anxious, stared this way and that in the glare and flicker of firelight and held his crossbow close to his chest. The high garden walls seemed to frown on him, and he stumbled as his shuffling feet missed a step to send him reeling down a path into the knee-deep mist of the lower terraces -

— That eerily sentient mist, out of which Harry Keogh rose up like a ghost from its tomb, with his hellish orbs more than reflecting the destruction of his house.

'Nuh-uh-urgh!' Paxton's eyes stood out in the parchment of his face as the Necroscope towered over him, and his inarticulate gurgle of a cry caused the other agents to turn from watching the burning house towards him in his extremity of terror.

What they saw was this: Paxton in the grip of something which was only half — or less than half-human. They saw Paxton, but only as a detail of the main scene, whose utter horror seemed to sear itself on to their retinas. And in the minds of the three one thought was universally uppermost: that they were here as volunteers, come to kill this, an act which must surely qualify them as the bravest or most lunatic heroes of all time!

The lower half of Harry's figure was mist-shrouded, visible only as a vague outline in the opaque, milky swirl… but the rest of him was all too visible. He was wearing an entirely ordinary suit of dark, ill-fitting clothes which seemed two sizes too small for him, so that his upper torso sprouted from the trousers to form a blunt wedge. Framed by his jacket, which was held together at the front (barely) by one straining button, the wedge-shaped bulk of Harry's rib cage was massively muscular.

His white, open-necked shirt had burst open down the front, revealing the ripple of his muscle-sheathed ribs and the deep, powerful throb of his chest; the shirt's collar stuck up now from Harry's jacket like a crumpled frill, made insubstantial by the corded bulk of his leaden neck. His flesh was a sullen grey, dappled lurid orange and sick yellow by leaping fire and gleaming moonlight. But there was scarlet there, too, leaking from the hole in his jacket and splashed diagonally across his straining shirt. He towered all of fifteen inches taller than Paxton, whose cringing form he quite literally dwarfed. And his face -

— That was the absolute embodiment of a waking nightmare!

Ben Trask gawped at him in utter disbelief and thought: Oh my good God! And I thought I could maybe talk to that!

Oh, but you can still talk to me, Ben, the Necroscope told him, Trask's first personal experience in the use of telepathy, made possible through the sheer power of Harry's probe. It's just that where Paxton's concerned, I may not be willing to listen, that's all.

Teale was gibbering, trying desperately to find strength to lift and aim his crossbow, and failing. His talent, a generally untrustworthy ability to read something of the future, was conjuring all sorts of monstrous events in his mind's eye, piling them up so thick and fast that he was utterly unnerved. It was his proximity to Harry, of course. Robinson was similarly stricken. This close to a true metaphysical POWER, his own small talent was reacting like an iron filing whirled in a strong magnetic field. But in any case he couldn't use his terrible weapon, not without burning Paxton, too.

Trask was on his own, the only capable one among them, and now he raised and aimed his SMG at Harry where he held Paxton up before him like a rag doll. Paxton, dangling there in mid-air, staring gape-jawed and bulge-eyed into the Necroscope's unbelievable face, knowing he was only inches from the gates of hell. That close, yes, for he was the mind-flea; he was the unbearable, unscratchable itch. Or he had been — until now.

Harry looked at him through halogen Hallowe'en eyes which seemed to drip sulphur, looked at him and… grinned? A grin, was that what it was? In an alien, vampire world called Starside on the other side of the Möbius Continuum, there at least it might be called a grin. But here it was the rabid, slavering grimace of a great wolf; here it was teeth visibly elongating, curving up and out of gleaming gristle jaw-ridges to shear through gums which spurted splashes of hot ruby blood; here it was the gradual inclination of a monstrous head through several degrees to an almost curiously inquiring angle, the way you might look at a mischievous pet. And having looked it was a writhing of scarlet lips, a flattening of convoluted snout, the beginning of a slow yawning of mantrap jaws to tut-tut and even chastise that disobedient lap dog.

And perhaps to punish it?

That face… that mouth… that crimson cavern of stalactite, stalagmite teeth, jagged as shards of white, broken glass. What? The gates of Hell? All of that and worse.

When Harry had grabbed Paxton and lifted him off his feet, he'd knocked the telepath's crossbow from his grasp and thrown it down. Unarmed, Paxton was a piece of candy, a sweetmeat, a Coconut Flake. He was something to munch on. Why, Harry could bite his face off if he wished it! And suddenly Trask thought: Maybe he does! Maybe he will!

'Harry!' Trask shouted. 'Don't!'

The Necroscope slowly closed his jaws, looked up. He glared at Trask across the misted garden, in the ruddy illumination of the burning house. At Ben Trask, once a friend, with whom he'd stood side by side against… against just such a creature as he had now become.

And Trask, whey-faced, staring back, thinking: For fuck's sake don't, Harry!

Would you shoot me, Ben?

You know I would. I wouldn't want to, even now, but I'd have to. It's you or the world, don't you see? I don't want to see my world die screaming… then laugh and crawl right back out of its grave! But if you let him go — Paxton, I mean — if you let him live, then I'd be ready to believe you'd let us all live.

Your world is safe, Ben. I'm not staying here.

Starside?

Harry's mental shrug. There's nowhere else.

Trask looked down the sights of his SMG. He could shoot at Harry's mist-wreathed legs and maybe chop him down, or he could aim at the Necroscope's head and upper body and try not to hit Paxton into the bargain. But he was a good shot and unlikely to miss his target. Or he could simply take Harry's word for it, that he was going away from here and the world had nothing to fear from him. Except, looking at him now, who could believe that?

Harry read these things in Trask's mind and tried to make it easier for him: he put Paxton down. Which was anything but easy for the Necroscope: he had to fight the Thing inside him, and fight hard. But he did it. And speaking out loud, or rather grunting in the deep bass monotone of the Wamphyri, he asked, 'How's this, Ben?'

Trask gasped his relief. 'It's good, Harry. It's good.' But even answering he was aware, out of the corner of his eye, of Teale and Robinson unfreezing and lining up their weapons. 'Hold it, you two!' he shouted.

Harry shot a blood-tinged glance at Teale, which sufficed to send him staggering back, and tuned into Robinson's mind to advise him: Better listen to Trask, son. Try to fry me on Earth and I'll fry you in Hell!

Trask put his SMG on safe and tossed it aside. 'The war's over, Harry,' he said.

But Paxton, lying in the mist where Harry had dropped him, squeezed the trigger of his regained crossbow and cried, 'Oh no it fucking isn't!'

Moments earlier the Necroscope had picked up the message from Paxton's mind: that a deadly hardwood bolt was about to come winging his way. Almost instinctively he had conjured a Möbius door; and now, with the deceptively sinuous grace of the Wamphyri, he stepped or flowed backwards into it. To the four espers it seemed that he had simply ceased to be. Paxton's bolt shot forward into the misty swirl of Harry's vacuum and was eaten up by it, leaving the telepath panting: 'I got him! I… I'm sure I got the bastard! I couldn't miss!' Laughing however shakily, he got to his feet…

… And the mist where it had closed on the Necroscope opened up again, and his clotted, gurgling, disembodied voice came out of it, saying, 'How sorry I am to have to disappoint you.'

Shit! Trask thought, snatching a breath of hot, smoky air as a huge grey hand with nails like rust-scabbed fish hooks reached out of empty space, closed over Paxton's head and dragged him shrieking out of the garden and right out of this universe. And Harry Keogh's monstrous voice left hanging on the air, saying: 'Ben, I'm afraid I just have to do this…'

In the Möbius Continuum Harry hurled Paxton away from him and heard his scream dwindling into conjectural distances. He should leave him there, let him spin on his own axis, flailing across parallel infinities for ever, shrieking and sobbing and, if his heart should burst, finally dying a raving madman. But that would be to pollute this mystical place. There had to be a better way — a more reasonable punishment — than that.

He sped after him, caught and steadied him, and drew him close. And there in the Möbius Continuum — whose nature even Harry was only just beginning to suspect or understand, where even the smallest thought has weight — he said to him: Paxton, you're a miserable creature.

'Get away from me! Get the f-f-fuck away from me!'

Tsk, tsk! Harry sucked his teeth, which as his blood began to cool were halfway to normal again. And you a telepath! You don't need to shout in the Möbius Continuum, mind-flea. Just thinking it is enough. And in that selfsame moment Harry knew what he must do.

Of course. Paxton the mind-flea, the mental vampire who lived on the thoughts of others rather than their blood; the thought-thief, the unscratchable itch. How many victims had felt his bite? E-Branch was full of them. And how many more didn't even know — weren't equipped to know — that he'd ever been into their minds in the first place?

Or maybe not a flea. Maybe… a mosquito? But in any case, a harmful parasite with a painful, irritating sting. It was high time someone drew that sting. And the Necroscope knew just exactly how to do it.

He entered Paxton's dazed, terrified mind to search for and discover the telepathic mechanism which was the source of the man's talent. It was something Paxton had been born with and there was no switching it off; but it could be shielded, buried in psychic 'lead' like a rogue reactor, until it melted down or burned itself out trying to break free. Which was precisely what the Necroscope did. He wrapped Paxton's talent in essence of Wamphyri mind-smog, smothered it in a blanket of ESP-opaqueness, mothballed it in ephemeral and yet almost unbreakable threads of what ordinary people term 'the privacy of their own minds'. Except that in Paxton's case, the privacy would be his prison.

And when Harry was done with him, then he delivered Paxton back to the garden of the burning house, where the men from E-Branch had moved down to the river wall away from the heat of the conflagration. Against a backdrop of roaring, gouting gold and crimson fire, Harry emerged from the Möbius Continuum and tossed a snivelling Paxton into Ben Trask's arms.

The telepath at once collapsed in tears, sank raggedly to his knees and hugged Trask's legs. Looking down at him, Trask was aghast. 'What have you done to him?'

'Neutered him,' said Harry.

'What?'

Harry shook his head. 'Not his balls, his telepathy. Mental emasculation. He's raped his last mind. And where the Branch is concerned, I've done you my last favour.'

'Harry?'

'Look after yourself, Ben.'

'Harry, wait!'

But the Necroscope was no longer there.

He stood off for long moments along the river and watched the old house burn. What was it Faéthor Ferenczy had called his castle in the Khorvaty, when finally that morbid pile had been reduced to rubble? His last vestige on Earth? Well, and this obsolete old house had been Harry's last vestige.

In this world, anyway…

On a beach of gleaming white sand on the other side of the world, Penny had fashioned a bikini for herself from strips of Harry's bedsheet. Now, walking at the rim of the ocean, she picked up and examined exotic shells where they littered the tide's reach. Strangely (because she usually tanned without difficulty, and also because her as yet innocent mind hadn't recognized the significance of it) she found the sun spiteful; her exposed skin was already blotched and rapidly turning red. To cool herself, she kneeled in the shallows of a tidal pool and let the sea lave her. Which was when Harry returned and called out to her from the shade of the wind-blasted tree.

She looked up and saw him, and felt the power of his magnetism stronger than ever before. It was love and it was much more than love: he need only command it and there was nothing she wouldn't do for him. She was entirely enthralled. Taking a magnificent conch with her, she ran to him and saw how different he looked. Different and yet the same. Before returning to her, the Necroscope had stopped off somewhere to pick up a wide-brimmed black hat and a long black overcoat; weird gear, Penny thought, for a beach in the heat of the midday sun! Now he reminded her of the grim-faced bounty hunter or undertaker in… how many of those old spaghetti Westerns? Except they hadn't worn dark-tinted glasses.

Where the tree gave its maximum shade, Harry eased off his coat and displayed evidence of his wounds: great mats of blood congealed into rusty scabs which crusted his tatters and glued them to him. Feeling his hurt — indeed, feeling more of it than he felt — Penny unwrapped the strip of soaked cotton sheet from her breasts and dampened the Necroscope's bloodied areas with brine. And then she was able to peel the soiled rags from his now entirely human body. His human-looking body, anyway.

From the front, the bullet hole in Harry's right shoulder didn't look too bad, but from the back it was awful. A chunk of flesh the size of a child's clenched fist had been blown right out of him, and its rim at the top had been ripped by Johnny Pound's hook. But amazingly (to Penny, if not to the Necroscope himself) the wound was already healing. New skin was forming around the crater where flesh and bone had been blasted away, and while the pulp within gleamed red as meat on a butcher's block, still it had almost stopped bleeding.

'It's healing now,' Harry grunted. 'If you just sat there and watched it, you'd see it closing up. Another day, two at most, and there'll be only a scar. Another week and even the restructured bone will have stopped aching.'

Fascinated, drawn to him irresistibly, she clutched his shoulders and turned her lithe, lovely body this way and that, brushing her breasts against the gaping hole in his back. Done on impulse, her eroticism caused the Necroscope a little pain and gave him a lot of pleasure. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the brown of her nipples stained red by blood fresh from his body. But in the next moment, astonished by the strength of her own sensuality, Penny said, 'I…I don't quite know why I did that!'

'I do,' he growled, taking her there on the sand — and in turn being taken — again and again through the long hot afternoon.

It was love and lust and what lovers have done since the beginning of time; but it was other than that, more than that. It was an initiation of sorts, for Harry as much as for Penny. And it proved beyond a doubt how utterly inexhaustible are the Wamphyri and their thralls.

Later… she woke up feeling chilly, saw Harry sitting there with her shell in his lap. His face was gaunt, almost pained. The sun, setting over the rolling ocean, highlighted the rims of hollows in his face like shallow craters in a moonscape. Squinting her eyes until he was little more than a dark silhouette, Penny tried to make this newly perceived Harry less stark. The too-distinct lines melted a little and softened his face, but the pain was still there. Then, when he felt her eyes on him, the mood was broken. And when she sat up shivering, he draped her with his coat.

Picking the shell up, she said, 'It's beautiful, isn't it?'

He gave her a strange look. 'It's a dead thing, Penny.'

'Is that all you see, death?'

'No.' He shook his head. 'I feel it, too. I'm the Necroscope.'

'You feel that the shell is dead?'

He nodded. 'And how the creature it housed died. Well, not feel it, exactly. I… experience it? No, not that, either.' He shrugged and sighed. 'I just know.'

She looked at the conch again, and the sun struck mother-of-pearl from its iridescent rim. 'It isn't pretty?'

He shook his head. 'It's ugly. Do you see that tiny hole toward the pointed end?'

She nodded.

'That's what killed it. Another snail, smaller but deadly

— deadly to it — bored into it and sucked out its life. A vampire, yes. There are millions of us.' And she saw him give a shudder.

She put the shell aside. That's a horrid story, Harry!'

'It's also a true one.'

'How can you know that?'

His voice was harsher now. 'Because I'm the Necroscope! Because dead things talk to me. All dead things. And if they haven't the mind for it, then they… convey to me. And your "pretty" bloody shell? It conveys the slow grind of its killer eating into its whorl, the penetration of its probe, and the dully burning seep of its fluids being drained off. Pretty? It's a corpse, Penny, a cadaver!'

He stood up and scuffed listlessly at the sand, and she said, 'Has it always been like that? For you, I mean?'

'No.' He shook his head. 'But it is now. My vampire is growing. As he grows sharper, so he hones my talents. There was a time when I could only talk to dead people; or rather to creatures I could understand. Dogs go on after death just like we do, did you know that? But now — ' Again his shrug. 'If they were alive once but now are dead, I can feel them. And I feel more and more of them all the time.' He kicked at the sand again. 'You see this beach? The very sand sighs and whispers and moans. A million billion corpses broken up by time and the tides. All of that life, wasted, and none of it ready or willing to lie quiet and still. And every dead thing wanting to know, "Why did I die? Why did I die?"'

'But it has to be that way,' she gasped, frightened by his tone. 'It always has been. Without death, what would be the point of life? If we had forever, we wouldn't strive to do anything — because everything would be possible!'

'In this world — ' he took her shoulders, ' — there's life and there's death. But I know another world where there's a state between the two…' And as it grew dark he told her all about Starside.

When he was done she shivered to the inevitability of it and asked, 'When shall we go there?'

'Soon,' he told her.

'We can't stay here? I know that place is bound to frighten me.'

'Do my eyes frighten you?' They were like small lamps in his face.

She smiled. 'No, because I know they're your eyes.'

'But they frighten others.'

'Because they don't know you.'

'On Starside I'll build an aerie,' Harry told her, 'where your eyes will be as red as mine.'

'Will they?' She seemed almost eager.

'Oh, yes!' Harry told her. And to himself: You may be sure of it, you poor darling child. For even here and now, as early and unanticipated as this, he could detect the faintest scarlet flush in them…

While she slept in his arms, Harry sat and made plans. They weren't much, just something to do. They kept him from thinking too deeply about his and Penny's imminent departure, its possible perils. About its inevitability.

For it was inevitable — as was the drone of the helicopter whose searchlights came sweeping along the beach from the east. Harry had thought they'd be safe here for… oh, a long time. But as he reached out and touched the minds of the people in the droning dragonfly airplane he saw that he'd been wrong. They were espers.

The Branch,' he said, perhaps bitterly, waking Penny up and forming Möbius equations in his mind.

'What, even here?' she mumbled, as he shifted her across the continent to a clothing store in Sydney.

'Even here… there… yes,' he said. 'Indeed, anywhere. Their locators will find me no matter where I go; they'll alert their contacts worldwide; espers and bounty hunters will track and trap and eventually burn us. We can't fight a whole world. And even if I could, I don't want to. Because to fight is to surrender — to the thing inside me. And I'd prefer to be just me. For as long as possible, anyway. But tonight we'll lead them all a dance, right? For tomorrow we die.'

'Die?'

'We'll be dead to this world, anyway,' he said.

They chose expensive clothes willynilly, and an expensive leather suitcase in which to pack them. Then, as the store's alarms began to clamour, they moved on.

It had been 9:00 p.m. local time when they left the beach; it was 11:30 in the store they robbed; moving east they got dressed on another beach (Long Beach) at 5 a.m. in the first light of dawn, and started a champagne breakfast in New York a little after 8 a.m. - and all in the space of thirty or so minutes!

Penny ate her steak barbecued, medium rare; Harry's was so rare it dripped blood, just the way he'd ordered it. They drank three bottles of champagne. When presented with the bill the Necroscope laughed, snatched Penny into his lap, tilted his chair over backwards… and the pair of them out of this world into the Möbius Continuum.

Minutes later (at 10:30 p.m. local time) and some three and a half thousand miles north of where they'd started out, they robbed the innermost security vaults of the Bank of Hong Kong; and by midnight they'd lost a million Hong Kong Dollars on the gaming tables in Macau. A few minutes later (at 6:30 in the evening, local), still ordering and drinking champagne, Harry bundled an entirely tipsy Penny into a hotel bed in Nicosia, and left her there to sleep it off. She dripped pearls and diamonds and her skin smelled of a fine haze of alcohol. Most women (were they truthful) would give an entire world for the things she had seen and done and experienced in the last half-day of her life on Earth. So had Penny given a world. That's why Harry had arranged and executed it.

Their binge had taken a little over three hours: the locators at E-Branch HQ in London — and others in Moscow — were quite dizzy. But the Necroscope knew that Penny was as yet too weak a source for them to track as a single entity. On her own, they probably wouldn't be able to find her. Even if they could, he doubted if they'd have a man in Cyprus. She'd be safe there. For a little while, anyway.

And now it was time he made their Starside reservations…