Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (35 page)

she already knew him. So much so that when she should have let him be killed - or killed him herself - instead she’d entrusted herself to him! Then, later,
he
had sought her out, to bring her a warning. This mysterious Harry Keogh.

What was she thinking? That he might actually be
that
mysterious one,
the
Mysterious One, for whom the dog-Lord waited? And if he was, and she had simply let him walk out of here … ?

Bonnie Jean had lived too long to panic, but for a moment that’s what it felt like. Then logic took over. So Harry Keogh had come and gone … so what? He would be back, and she
knew
he would be back -whenever she called!

Through her hypnotism, her fascination, he was now as much in thrall to her as she was to her sleeping Master.

Except he didn’t know it yet and probably never would. She could be with him -use him, deal with him, however she chose - and afterwards he would remember only what she required him to remember.

Her immediate instinct, to call him on the telephone - now, at once -gradually eased.
He
was at her beck and call, and not the other way around! And anyway, he wasn’t going anywhere for at least three weeks. And when he did he’d be going with B.J., to see her Master. Yes, and then all would be well. If by some miracle Harry should prove to be the one, then she would reap her reward: her Master’s eternal gratitude. And if he was not the one, still she would be rewarded, and the dog-Lord’s most urgent need satisfied. For it would also be the time of replenishment, the time of nourishment.

Bonnie Jean’s time, too, as well as that of her Lord and Master and ancestor, the dog-Lord Radu Lykan …!

Meanwhile, she would put a watch on the watcher, and perhaps discover who or what he was. Using her girls, it would be an easy thing to arrange a roster of observers - a stake-out? - on the street outside the wine bar. A tiny garret window in BJ.’s bedroom looked out over the rooftops, but could just as easily look down across the street into the very doorway where Harry had seen him. A person might sit there, unseen and unsuspected behind the window’s net curtains all day long, and keep watch on the street. All night long, too, if B.J. desired it. Then, if someone was watching the place, and if he should be a terrible someone, B.J. would soon know about it. And the next time one of her girls followed someone, be sure she would not lose
him!

She would not
dare
lose him!

Not for her life. Not for all their lives …

It was that same afternoon. Some miles away in the study of his house outside Bonnyrig, the Necroscope Harry Keogh sat absorbed in - and occasionally nodding over - the list of faraway places which he’d spent hours compiling in the reading room of a local library. His ‘system’ had been elementary, and flawed:

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Take a modern World Atlas and track the lines of longitude west from the north-eastern region of the British Isles to discover areas of similar climatic characteristics and habitability in the rest of the world; not forgetting the west coast of England itself, of course, but with all coastal regions given the same priority.

The idea sprang from what his Ma had said, and what he had later thought: that Brenda might have found
this
place, Bonnyrig, ideally suited to her personality. From which Harry had gone several steps further, extrapolating an imaginary - yet persistently ‘real’ - world or place of dramatic scenery, misted nights, slanting sunlit days, long grasses, leaning trees and wild flowers. Indeed, a vast garden run wild, all hidden away from the eyes of men. Hidden from Harry’s eyes, anyway.

So where to find such a place? And would the climate prove to be similar along the same lines of longitude? For the imagined scene - at least with regard to its weather patterns - wasn’t especially dissimilar to the northeast coastal region of Brenda’s childhood. And the Necroscope had simply extended that region one hundred and fifty miles north to take in Edinburgh and the Firth of Forth. And Bonnyrig, of course.

It gave him a band round the Earth bordered by lines of longitude 55 and 56 North, including parts of Antrim, Donegal, and Londonderry in Northern Ireland; which was something that Harry hadn’t previously considered - that Brenda and his baby son could be as close as Ireland. It had given him pause, but not as much as the discovery that if he followed the same lines east, they would also enclose Moscow, several thousands of miles of frozen tundra, the Bering Sea, and Alaska!?

Which would seem to put paid to
that
theory, at least.

And Harry had shaken his head and grinned, however wrily, thinking himself a fool that he hadn’t paid more attention in school. If only his knowledge of the world’s geography was as good as his understanding of maths! But there again, the Necroscope’s amazing skill with numbers had very little to do with his education. Nothing he’d learned from the living, anyway …

It was then, as he tossed his pencilled list aside to let his head loll against the back of his easy chair, that the telephone rang.

Harry sat up, reached for the telephone on the occasional table, paused and frowned. B.J.’s bottle of red wine was there, beside the telephone where he’d set it down. And the Necroscope was thirsty. He - or Alec Kyle’s body - was thirsty. His eyes stung like there was a pound or two of grit in them; his throat hurt as if someone had wire-brushed it on the inside; his mind felt equally desiccated, dried out. And somehow he knew that a sip of the wine, just a sip, would ease everything and he’d be able to face up to things. But face up to
what
things? Just a moment ago he had seemed okay, and now … ?

For his life, Harry couldn’t say why he had frozen like that, with his hand stretching halfway to the ‘phone. But the room was suddenly darker, as if a storm was about to break. Or maybe it was just the grimy patio windows; he hadn’t found the time or energy to clean them, and what litle light forced its way in from the overgrown garden was usually grey.

The telephone rang again, insistently, drawing his hand just a few inches closer, to where it hovered nervously above the top of the dusty table. Yet still he held back from picking up the ‘phone. He felt a chill on or
in
his back, as if a cold wind was blowing along the marrow of his spine, and shivered uncontrollably. In the last few seconds it was as if the whole room had gone cold as the grave! Now what the hell… ?

Pick it up, idiot!
he heard his own voice demanding from deep inside his head.
Pick up the damn telephone! What in the world’s
wrong with you?

But he wasn’t expecting a call, was he? Or was he? There was something he should remember about the telephone, but when he went to think about it, it kept giving him the slip. Like a word on the tip of his tongue that he simply couldn’t remember. And his brain was fuzzy from all the planning he was … well,
supposed
to be doing!
Was
he expecting a call? Maybe he was, but not yet, surely? And what call was it anyway?

The ‘phone rang yet again, and this time - despite that he knew it was coming - it caused him to start in his chair.

So why not pick the fucking thing up, answer it and find out? But find out what? Something that he really wouldn’t want to know? Maybe. And what had made him think
that,
anyway?

Questions,
questions!
And nothing in his head but a ball of fluff, or rather a tangle of barbed wire. His stinging eyes … his sore throat … and B.J.’s bottle of red wine sitting there oh-so-temptingly … and the—

Rrrr-iiiing!… Rrrr-iiiing!

—
Damned telephone!

Harry went for it, curled his fingers around it, picked it up … and the room went dark as night, so that he knew it had to be a storm.
Now the thunder!
he thought.
Now the lightning!
But the thunder and lightning never came.

Something else came.

Almost involuntarily, Harry tightened his grip on the fur ruff of the telephone as he drew it from its cradle towards his face … the telephone that wasn’t.
He
drew
it
at first, but in the next moment it was drawing him! A straining, bristling ruff that dragged on his arm as if he was walking an unruly brute of a dog. And he simply couldn’t believe his eyes as he looked at his hand and saw what it was holding in check, but barely:

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Not a dog, but a snarling, coughing, choking wolfs head, red-eyed with feral yellow pupils!
The thing didn’t have a body but grew out of the telephone’s speaker. And the cable was like a leash that lashed with the living head’s frantic motion, then stretched itself taut as the awful thing it anchored strained on it, turning Harry’s arm inwards towards his gasping, utterly astonished mouth! The head was trying to get at him, bite him, crush his face in its slavering, fetid mantrap jaws!

‘Almighty
G-God!’
Harry gasped, tightening his fist to a knot in the ruff of coarse fur, trying to force the head back while bringing his left hand into play as he fought to protect his face. The wolfs gaping, snarling muzzle was black leather flecked with white foam; its unbelievable
teeth
were ivory yellow; its ears lay flat to its head, seeming to streamline the horror of its intentions as they pointed the whole gnashing, clashing monstrosity of a visage at the Necroscope. Then—

—That tunnel of teeth closing on Harry’s flapping left hand, where he felt bones snap in at least three of his fingers, and the searing agony of flesh severed, shorn through!

And
paws
as big as his hands were elongating themselves out of the telephone’s speaker, followed by a long grey slime-damp body, as if the telephone was giving birth to this
Thing!
And the jaws were clashing inches from his face; they slopped blood and bits of mangled, twitching finger! And the grey fur of the beast’s ruff tearing in his right hand, coming out in scurvy, matted tufts!

He … he couldn’t hold it off!

And worst of all, the
intelligence
in those yellow-cored, murderous, oh-so-knowing eyes, as the red-ribbed throat of the monster expanded to engulf his face, his head!

Harry screamed gurglingly but unashamedly, thrusting himself back so spastically, with such force in his driving legs, as to topple his chair over backwards.

And as if from a million miles away, the heavy pattering of raindrops on glass, and a flash of lightning at last. Then thunder clattering mightily close by, and a gust of wind hurling open the patio doors.

Harry’s Ma came rushing in through the doors, crying:

Harry! Good God, son … what sort of a dream was that!?

And his Ma was all mud and bones and weed, but that was okay because it was how she had always been. But he also knew she shouldn’t be here, that she
wasn’t
here except… except in his head … ?

Harry?

And, ‘Ma!’ he gasped, panted, choked, where he lay sprawled on the floor, with the rain hissing in his face, and a wind howling from the garden, whirling his pages of loose-leaf notepaper in a dervish dance all around the room.

Dream? Of course it had been a dream! But had she really needed to ask what sort?

‘A nightmare, Ma,’ he told her, where her drowned spirit lay deep in mud and weeds in a bight in the river that was her grave. ‘A f-fucking godawful n-n-nightmare!’ For the first (and probably the last) time in his life, the Necroscope Harry Keogh had uttered a curse word in the presence of his beloved Ma.

But he needn’t worry, for his Ma had ‘seen’ his dream and understood …

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V

HARRY: PRESENTIMENTS AND

PRECAUTIONS BONNIE JEAN: THE ROUTE TO THE LAIR

‘Ma,’ Harry said, after he’d stopped shivering. ‘Do you think it’s possible I’m going … wel, maybe a litle crazy?’

Do you mean really crazy?
(His long-dead mother was careful how she answered him).
Do you mean mad? If so, then I think it’s highly
unlikely. If that were going to happen at all, son, then surely it would have happened some time ago? But after all you’ve been through -
which really doesn’t bear thinking about -1 think it’s
very
possible that you’re suffering from stress, anxiety, pressure. And who knows?

Perhaps you’re physically ill too. I mean, with an ordinary illness?

‘My eyes? My sore throat? The fluff in my head?’ He blinked watering eyes and swallowed hard to try to ease his throat.

Flu, if ever I saw a dose!
his Ma told him.
All the classic symptoms. You’re suffering from the backlash of living down in London. I was only
there once - oh, thirty years ago, when I was a girl - and then only for a few weeks, but it did the same to me! All that smog, the smoky trains and
dirty railway stations. Not only that, but didn’t I warn you against coming down to the river to talk to me? Not in this bad weather, Harry! Not
when you could just as easily be warm and dry in the comfort of the house.

Harry shrugged and told her, ‘But you know that isn’t my way, Ma.’ Then he managed a wry grin, and added: ‘Anyway, that London you’re talking about was some time ago! It’s not as bad as that now. Don’t I recal reading somewhere that if you fel in the Thames in the

‘Forties, when you were a girl, you’d have to be realy lucky to drown - because it was much more likely you’d die of any one of a dozen fatal infections instead?’

He sensed his Ma’s incorporeal nod. /
think thafs probably true, yes. But—

‘—
But there are fish in the Thames now,’ he informed her. ‘Even salmon!’