Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (18 page)

The place was quiet. With the majority of esper personnel already checked out, the main corridor might easily be mistaken for any corridor in any better-class London hotel. But the Duty Officer had met the three out of the elevator, and as the Necroscope entered his room and made to close the door … suddenly it seemed he heard someone breathe his name!

He immediately boiled over and, stepping back into the corridor, shouted, ‘Hey, look! If I’m involved, why not simply
involve
me? I mean, don’t talk about me, talk to me! What am I, a social leper?’

Layard had already entered his office; but Darcy and the Duty Officer, an esper by the name of John Grieve - a bespectacled, balding twig of a man in rolled up shirt-sleeves, grey slacks and slippers, with a clipped, precise, military or ‘old-school-tie’ sort of voice that Harry supposed might easily get him type-cast as an Inland Revenue Inspector, which he was anything but - were standing with their heads almost conspiratorially close together.

‘Well?’ he snapped, as they turned puzzled faces towards him.

‘Well what?’ Darcy was plainly annoyed. ‘We weren’t talking about you, Harry!’

‘Er, but we
were
about to.’ John Grieve was less certain and fidgeted with the lobe of his right ear. ‘Or if not about you, about your wife. And you’re perfectly correct: I should have included you. But I wanted Darcy’s opinion first.’

Now Darcy was looking at Grieve in the same puzzled fashion. ‘What? What’s going on?’

That’s what I was trying to tell you. It’s about Brenda.’ And quickly, before Darcy and the Necroscope could break into a bout of angry questioning: ‘We seem to have lost her - and the baby.’ In the Necroscope’s mind, Grieve’s dry, official, almost emotionless voice seemed to ring like an echo chamber; Darcy’s, too. Perhaps it was an irritating effect of the empty corridor and rooms, he thought, and put it aside if only for the moment. But Brenda and Little Harry, missing? That was something else!

‘Lost them?’ he repeated Grieve. ‘My wife and child? What do you mean, “lost” them?’ The phrase seemed too well-chosen, too final. Harry’s tired eyes were wide awake now, unblinking. ‘Have they … come to any harm?’ He grabbed the DO’s elbow.

Grieve looked him straight in the eyes and said, ‘No, not that we know of. Now, do you want to let go of my arm so I can talk to you in what’s left of comfort?’

Harry gritted his teeth but released him. And waiting for Grieve to speak, he re-evaluated what he knew of the man.

Grieve had two talents; one of them ‘dodgy,’ Branch parlance for an as yet undeveloped ESP ability, and the other very remarkable and possibly unique. His first gift was that of far-seeing: he was a human crystal ball. The only trouble was he had to know exactly where and what he was looking for, otherwise he could see nothing. His talent didn’t work at random but had to be directed: he had to have a definite target.

His second string made him doubly valuable. It could wel prove to be a reflection of his first talent, but occasionally it was a godsend. Grieve was a telepath, but a mind-reader with a difference. Yet again he had to ‘aim’ his talent; he could only read a person’s mind when he was talking to him … but if he knew the person in question, that
included
when they were talking on the telephone! Using John Grieve, there was no need for mechanical scrambler devices. It was one reason why Darcy used him as frequently as possible in the role of Duty Officer.

But… had it been something of Grieve’s talent that the Necroscope had experienced just a moment ago? Was it even possible?

‘You weren’t talking about me?’ Harry frowned and licked his dry lips, his mind returning to that peculiar sensation he had felt when he’d entered his room: the feeling that his name had been whispered. And then there was the echo chamber effect, which was still present: as if his head were hollow - or as if it were … what, occupied? By someone else?

Someone who was spying on his thoughts? ‘Were you
thinking
about me, then? And if so, would I be able to
hear
you thinking?’ Suddenly Brenda and the child had taken a back seat in Harry’s order of priorities. Or if not that exactly, then he’d seen the possibility of a connection with their disappearance and this new

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problem. A remote one (he hoped and prayed), but a possibility.

Again Harry gripped Grieve’s arm, then both of them, as he read the other’s negative stare. No, he wouldn’t have been able to hear Grieve thinking about him. And so: ‘John, I want you to read my mind,’ he snapped. ‘Go on in there and see what you can find. See
who
you can find! Do it now, as quickly as you can.’

Almost instinctively Grieve looked, and recoiled at once! He wrenched himself free of Harry, took a stumbling step backwards, said, ‘What…?’

‘Wel?’ Harry caught up with him and held him against the wal of the corridor. ‘What did you see?’ (Perhaps not surprisingly, the echo had vanished now; the voices of everyone involved were remarkably clear and ordinary; there was no whisperer in the Necroscope’s mind).

Darcy was looking worriedly from Harry to Grieve and back again. ‘What on earth …?’ he began to say. But Grieve cut him short with: Two of you?’ (This to Harry). ‘A moment ago, two of you. But now, only one. Only … you!’

Again Harry released him, and turned tremblingly away. He had been invaded, his mind broken into. Just like Banks, Stevens, and Jakes before him. For long moments there was an electric tension in the air, until finaly:

‘Well, is someone going to explain?!’ Darcy shouted.

At which Harry took them into his room and listened while Grieve reported the details of Brenda’s and Little Harry’s disappearance. Grieve didn’t waste any time, but the Necroscope was now sensitive to every second ticking by. And as he listened to Grieve, he also found himself listening to - or for - something in his head. But it didn’t return. Or not yet, anyway.

‘She was shopping in Knightsbridge,’ Grieve started. ‘She had the baby with her. We had men on her, of course, three of the best. The same people who have watched out for her all the time she’s been here, Special Branch and good at their job. Not espers but the next best thing.’ He shook his head. ‘If it were anyone else, I’d suspect their report was a whitewash. But not these blokes. They know what they’re doing. And if they say she disappeared, she disappeared .

. .

‘But not into the crowd, you understand, though certainly there were plenty of people on the streets. But she took young Harry into a baby outfitters, and left the minders waiting outside. Where they waited, and waited … and finally went in to see what was wrong. Well, there was no exit from the rear, but Brenda and the kid—’

‘—Were gone,’ Harry sounded much calmer now. ‘Yes, I get the picture. But what time was this?’

‘Five-thirty or thereabouts. You two had already left the H.Q. with Ken Layard. I didn’t want to cause a panic or divert you from what you were doing. There seemed every chance that we would pick Brenda up

again. I mean, we’re not looking after her because she’s under threat or anything, but mainly because … well, because—’

‘—Because sometimes she doesn’t seem capable of looking after herself?’ Harry cut in again. ‘It’s okay, go ahead and say it. She has problems, I know.’ And to himself:
Problems, Brenda? That’s saying the very least!

All those weeks, months of debriefing following the Bodescu case and Harry’s subsequent metempsychosis, his rehabitation of another’s body. Indeed his very
being,
when Brenda had thought him dead. Wouldn’t that be enough to …
unnerve
anyone? And gradually, during the course of all that debriefing, and Harry’s rehabilitation, it had become increasingly apparent that Brenda was in real trouble. But surely that was only to be expected, and might even have been anticipated.

For after all, Brenda had only recently become a mother; she’d still been recovering from an uncomfortable confinement and problematic birth, when for a while her doctor had thought he might lose her. Add to this the fact of her husband’s weird ‘talent,’

that he conversed with dead people, which Brenda had known about and which had preyed on her mind for months - and then the fact that her infant child seemed possessed of similar or even more frightening powers, so that even among the espers of E-Branch he was looked upon as something of a freak - and the fact that Harry was now (literally) a different person, one who
was
Harry, with all of his past, his memory and mannerisms, but living in a stranger’s body; the fact of the absolute
terror
Brenda had endured on the night when she came face to face with the monster Yulian Bodescu, whose like she couldn’t possibly have imagined even in her worst nightmares …

Little wonder her mind had started to give way under the strain. On top of which she hated London and couldn’t possibly return to Hartlepool in the northeast; her old flat would be poison to her and full of monstrous memories. For it was there that the Bodescu creature had attacked her, attempting to destroy both herself and her child!

Thus, as her mental connections with the real world were eroded, Brenda’s visits to various specialists and psychiatric clinics had increased. Until now … what had happened here? Had she decided that enough was enough? Or was it the work of some outside agency? Or could it be that the baby himself…?

‘Anyway,’ Grieve continued, glad to be off the hook, ‘it didn’t work out like I thought it would and they’re still missing. We have as many Branch agents on it as we can spare. They’re out there in the City right now, doing whatever they can.’

His words drew the Necroscope back to earth. The address of the store?’ The look on Harry’s face was now entirely grim.

Grieve took Darcy and Harry to the Ops Room, punched up a street

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map of London onto the big screen. He showed the Necroscope the exact location of the store.

Harry said, ‘Okay, now I have something to do.’ Then, to John Grieve: ‘I won’t be gone long, but in the meantime Darcy might like to tell you about the case we’re on.’ And to Darcy: ‘I hope this thing with Brenda has nothing to do with our werewolf, but ever since we got back here -1 don’t know, I can’t be sure - but I think I’ve been experiencing the same sort of mental invasion that Banks and the others described.’

‘Christ!’ Darcy gasped as the meaning, or a possible meaning, of what the Necroscope had said sank in. ‘But if he knows you’re on to him … do you think he’d take hostages?’

Harry held up his hands in a helpless gesture, but a moment later gave a grim shake of his head. ‘No, I don’t think my son would
let
him! Let’s hope it’s just a coincidence. But one thing for sure, I daren’t waste tonight. So while I’m gone perhaps you’d like to call in Trevor Jordan? Better still, let me have his address and tell him to wait there for me. It’s something Sir Keenan Gormley recommended … ”

Using several co-ordinates that he knew, the Necroscope went to the store in Knightsbridge where he entered the premises using the Mobius Continuum. His arrival at once set off the store’s alarms, but that didn’t bother him; in the event that his plan worked, he wasn’t going to be here very long.

In Harry’s incorporeal days, before his ‘repossession’ of Alec Kyle, he had been able to travel into the past and

‘immaterialize’ there: he’d been able to manifest a ghostly semblance of himself on any bygone event horizon. Now, embodied and fully corporeal once more, this was no longer possible; it would create unthinkable paradoxes and perhaps even damage the temporal flux itself. He could still travel
in
time, but while doing so must never attempt to leave the Mobius Continuum for the real world.

Transferring back to the Continuum, he found a past-time door and floated for a moment on the threshold, gazing on time past. This was a sight that never failed to awe him: the myriad blue life-threads of mankind, twisting and twining in the metaphysical ‘vacuum’ of a previously conjectural fourth dimension; those neon filaments that might best be likened to the ‘retinal memories’ of time, the trails of human lives that had travelled here; or if not here, in the mundane world on the other side of the Mobius Continuum.

And way back there in the past, the blue haze of Man’s origins, that supernova of human life, from which these streamers had hurled themselves into the ever-expanding future. It seemed to Harry that he heard an orchestrated, sighing
Ahhhhhhh
sound, like a single, pure note from some other-worldly instrument, or the massed voices of a magnificent chorus in a sounding cathedral; but in fact he knew that all

was silence, that it was only the effect of his stunned mind. For if any man were to actually
hear
the tumult of the past, that would be a sound to blast his brain and deafen him forever.

Almost reluctantly, the Necroscope brought himself back to the task in hand. This was the place where his wife and son had disappeared just a few hours ago. Well, he had his own theories about what had happened to them; and now, one way or the other, he intended to prove them. And without further ado he launched himself down the past timestream.

But here a curious and paradoxical thing. Because he had never existed in this particular spacetime, Harry had no past life-thread to follow but must simply let himself plummet, and because this region of the past was now
his
present, (and even his future!) his true lifeline extended
behind
him and seemed to unwind from him like cotton from a bobbin back to the past-time door. And Harry found the knowledge that he could return to his point of entry via that thread very reassuring …

In a little while he had reached his destination, arriving at a point in past time where it would be proved eventually that his son, the infant Harry, had contrived to bring about an amazing, almost unique occurrence. But that was for the future, not the past!