Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (71 page)

‘Damn, but ah’m fair knocked out!’ he declared. The only thing tha’s missin’ seems tae be the fated calf!’

‘Later, Jimmy,’ B.J. told him. ‘We’l eat later. But for now there’s the drinks. Wine’s ye’re tipple, is it no?’

‘Wine, whisky, whatever!’ he said, as she directed him to a stool at the bar. And Zahanine perched herself alongside, her swinging leg stroking his thigh. ‘Damn me!’ he said. ‘But ah’d swear this was al for me!’

B.J. poured red wine, (‘My own special reserve, Jimmy!’) which he swigged back almost without tasting it, and the party got underway. The girls took turns to flank him, rubbing themselves against him, al

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tits and smiling teeth and temptation. And Big Jimmy had never resisted temptation. It was wonderful! He was the only man here, and though he’d heard of parties like this, he’d never imagined he’d be the centrepiece at just such a one. A gaggle of stacked women, all bent on plying, pleasing, and plundering him of his vital fluids.

The lights were low, the juke box played some old bluesy stuff, and the girls seemed more gorgeous with every taste of B.J.’s red wine. As for Bonnie Jean herself:

She disappeared momentarily; Jimmy scarcely noticed; he was having a hard time loosening the last button on one of the girls’

blouses, but finally succeeded and gawped as her ample breasts lolled free and available. He would have availed himself, too, except B.J. was back, and dressed in a flimsy see-through baby-doll nightie!

By now Big Jimmy was certain-sure what kind of party this was, and despite that the room spun a little when he moved too fast, and that the bar stool seemed to sway under his backside so that he must constantly maintain his balance, his blood was pounding as he dazedly wondered which of the girls would want him first.

As it happened, they all did.

‘So,’ B.J. said, standing a little apart from him along the bar, ‘was it worth coming back to us, Jimmy?’

‘Ah wouldn’ae missed it for the world!’ he tried to answer, but all of his words came out sideways. He tried staring at B.J., tried to focus on her breasts, the dark V of her pubic region under the gauzy nightgown, but his gaze kept sliding off first to one side, then the other.

Behind the bar, Zahanine poured him the largest measure of whisky he’d ever seen, said: This will straighten you up, Big Jimmy. It’s more what you’re used to.’

‘Right!’ he said, and actually managed to grasp the glass, and tilt its contents down his throat. As Zahanine refilled it, two of the other girls wheeled a long trolley up behind Jimmy, positioning it precisely to his rear. Head lolling, he glanced around and took in the scene as B.J. and the girls stood chairs around the trolley, three to a side. Decked with a tablecloth, the trolley was quite empty. Obviously they’d be bringing food and a birthday cake out from the kitchen.

Obviously, yes.

‘Whose f-f-fuckin’ birthday is it anyway?’ Big Jimmy slurred, tilting more whisky down his throat. But this time as he went to put the glass down he missed the bar and sent the glass crashing to the floor. It pulled him together momentarily, long enough to look from face to face, stupidly, as he waited for an answer. And eventually B.J. said:

‘Birthday? Why, it’s yours, Jimmy!’

‘Aye!’ Big Jimmy rocked on his stool and tilted it back a litle way, but just a little too far. Tha’s a good’yin, that is!’ he roared.

‘Mine, by fuck!’ And he teetered there.

‘Except it’s not exactly a
birthday,’
B.J. said, and her voice was quite

different now, as she touched his shoulder to apply the very slightest pressure. Losing his balance and toppling over backwards, he scarcely knew he was falling. Several pairs of hands took his weight, lowering him on to the top of the trolley - or rather, to the hardwood draining board, for one of the girls had whipped away the cover.

There are two big days in a man’s life, Jimmy,’ B.J. said where she stood looking down into his quivering face. ‘One’s at the beginning, and the other’s at the end. Well, you’ve had the one, and this is the other.’

‘Wha’?’ he said. ‘Whazzat?’ As the girls strapped him down, hands and feet. And: ‘Eh? Eh?’ he queried, as they used knives as sharp as scalpels to cut away his clothing. And however ridiculously, Big Jimmy was still grinning, for this could only be some kind of weird sex game, or an even weirder dream, as someone turned the lights down more yet and B.J. ‘s eyes - and the eyes of her girls - became yellow triangles in the gloom.

Then there was more yellow - the glitter of golden instruments - as B.J. passed around slender tubes with trumpetlike mouthpieces, similar to the funnels she’d used in Radu Lykan’s redoubt. Except the feeders had been for the giving, and these smaller versions were for the taking.

Big Jimmy only noticed them in passing, however, because he wasn’t able to take his eyes off B.J. herself. Bonnie Jean, who might just as well be naked for all her nightgown hid, standing there in the gloom, with her yellow eyes - no, her
scarlet
eyes now -burning into Jimmy’s soul!

All feeling had fled him; Jimmy was as drunk, or as poisoned, as any man had ever been and remained conscious. Oh, he had a powerful constitution, but not powerful enough. He could still hear, see, think (though not much of the latter), but he couldn’t have moved a muscle, couldn’t speak any more, didn’t understand that the crimson pounding in his skull, his heart and his veins wasn’t sexual potency but an effect of the drugged wine.

And the ceiling was revolving, first this way, then that; and the faces of the girls looking down on him were foxy, wolfish, lustful; and B.J. herself—

—Wasn’t Bonnie Jean!

What she was exactly Jimmy couldn’t have said. But as the nightgown slid from her slender, furry form, and her soft dark muzzle wrinkled back in a half-snarl, half-smile, he thought:

What a bitch!
Which was perhaps as close as he would ever come to the truth of it. Or to anything. Ever again.

When the siphons sank in, Jimmy barely felt them. He felt the warmth leaving him, and the cold seeping in, and a tide as dark and darker than the deepest ocean floor rolling over him, washing him to and fro, and gradually dissolving him all away … but that was all.

Brian Lumley

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At 2:30 in the morning Bonnie Jean got Harry out of bed to answer the door; Sandra had dropped her off. There had been an after-hours birthday party for one of the girls. BJ. was sorry, but she hadn’t been able to get out of it. Anyway, here she was. Or, if it was too late …?

Too late? Harry told her she must be joking, made her a coffee in the kitchen while she watched, had a hard time keeping his hands off her but managed it somehow. And he even made smal talk, until she asked him: ‘Can’t we talk in bed?’

Then he almost had her on the kitchen table, and she was equaly wanton on the stairs, until finaly, in the bedroom … geting her out of her clothes was a frenzied affair, for both of them.

Afterwards …

… Harry lit one of his very rare cigaretes, and eventualy B.J. said, ‘Don’t think me vulgar, please, but that was a fuck. That wasn’t just making love …’ And replete - in every way replete - she was asleep before he could think her vulgar, or think anything else of her.

Before sleeping himself, he touched her body al over, but very gently so that she wouldn’t know. Maybe it was to reassure himself that she was there. But it felt like he was making sure that she was … she? What
that
was al about, he couldn’t say.

In his bed, she smeled of woman, and warm flesh, and sex, and -something else. Her breath? Copper? Salt? Or was it just the sex. Hah!
Just
the sex! But she’d been like an animal: vibrant, writhing, crushing him in her coils. He had found himself thinking on several occasions that she would draw blood - with her nails or her teeth - but she hadn’t. He believed he’d actualy felt her holding back; he
knew
there had been a repressed violence in her (purely sexual, he thought), which had inspired the same sort of frenzy in him. But now:

Now, despite that he felt exhausted, it was hard to get to sleep. Something was bothering him. Finaly Harry realized what it was: the light of the ful moon, pouring its rays in through his bedroom window.

So he got up and drew the faded curtains …

Life became a blur. Space, time, places, faces: Harry couldn’t say where they came from, or where they went. He even began to forget where he’d been; would have forgoten, he was sure, but for the list he kept of the places he’d visited. Spring turned to summer. The seasons were turning, and Harry frequently felt that his mind was turning, too … from sanity to ful-fledged madness. Yet when he was with B.J. he knew he was sane. Indeed, those were the only times when he did know it.

Upon a time he’d had difficulty accepting his body; he had felt that when it was hurt - despite that it
had
hurt - that it realy didn’t mater because it wasn’t his body anyway. But those times were past now.

That had a lot to do with B.J., too, the fact that she had accepted him. She’d become his anchor on an increasingly ephemeral world. She’d anchored his body, anyway. But his mind was something else.

Frequently he would wake up furious, frightened, unable to remember the nightmare that had awakened him, but thinking,
someone is fucking with my mind!
And promising himself that when he found out who it was, then there’d be hell to pay. But as the waking world took over, so the anger would recede. Yet the feeling persisted: that while his body was very definitely his now, his mind was someone else’s.

His memory, for one thing - or memories, recent memories, anyway - was or were totally up the creek. Sometime around the middle of May he’d mentioned it to Bonnie Jean when they stayed late in bed at his place one Sunday morning:

‘Do you remember when I did Ireland?’ And he had felt her drowsy attention sharpening, rapidly centering on him.

‘Yes. You’ve not long since finished. What of it?’

‘Well, I don’t! I don’t remember it!’

She had slipped out of bed in a moment, gone to a dresser, returned with his notebook and opened it at the relevant pages: his Irish ‘itinerary.’ And she’d read from a list of places in his handwriting, starting at Belfast and working down the coast to Dundalk before he stopped her.

That’s right! That’s right!’ He was excited, frustrated. ‘Downpatrick and Newry and Kilkeel, and half-a-dozen more. You think I don’t remember?’ His jaw was tight where he scowled at her almost accusingly.

She sat beside him, looked down on him curiously with her head cocked on one side, and said, logically, ‘But didn’t you just say that you
don’t
remember?’

And she was right. It was a contradiction, a confusion, a confounded nonsense! He had shook his head, flapped his hands, said:

‘Green fields; emerald green, in fact! Greener than England. Irish accents - “Top o’ the mornin’ to yeh, sor!” Little pubs with ocean outlooks and peat fires. Shillelaghies and all that shit. Picture book stuff. Toss in a pixie or two, and … ”

‘Harry!’ she’d stopped him. ‘What
is
all this?’

And the look on her face had said it all: that it wasn’t rational talk, and hardly reasonable behaviour, that he should take this out, whatever it was, on her.

After that they hadn’t seen each other for a week or more. Finally he’d called her and apologized for his irrational accusations, which had been directed at the world in general, never at Bonnie Jean. She had seemed uncertain and he’d said he would come and see her at B.J.’s. She had stalled him and come to him instead. For which he was grateful, for she really had become his one anchor on the world …

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No, for there was one other, of course, but Harry hardly dared speak to his Ma any more. And (mercifully) he knew that she wasn’t likely to sneak up on him at an awkward moment. She knew he liked his privacy and would wait until he came to her, to the riverbank. He hoped so, anyway.

But a new idea had occurred to Harry, and he felt stupid that he hadn’t thought of it earlier. He’d been relying on his own skills and the extraordinary talents at E-Branch to turn up something on Brenda and the baby. But wasn’t that exactly what the missing pair would expect? Harry Jr was a Power in his own right and would know how to avoid that sort of detection. And he could move his mother at will any time he wanted to. As to providing for her, or for both of them …

well, who could say what he was or wasn’t capable of? He would provide for his Ma what she couldn’t provide for herself, and vice versa.

So, they would naturally expect the very sort of approach that Harry was employing: the esoteric, the gadgets, the ghosts of E-Branch. But what about a more
mundane
approach? Every major town and city in the Yellow Pages of the whole wide world - certainly the Western World - listed scores of detective agencies! And here was Harry Keogh, Necroscope, trying to cover al of that ground himself. Which he could do, of course, given an eternity of time! Stupid! And if he should ever be lucky enough to get close and they spotted him … then the whole wild-goose chase would have to start all over again.

But to have fifty detective agencies all on the job at the same time, in fifty different places—

—would cost a hel of a lot of money! And Harry’s funds went only so far…

…
His
funds, yes.

But there were others who could well afford it. According to Darcy Clarke, anyway …

By the middle of June Harry had set up the mechanisms for putting his battalions of detectives in their regiments of agencies in England, France, Germany and the USA, to work. Al he needed was the funding:
at least three and a half million
pounds sterling,
or the equivalent in whatever currency was available, to guarantee he could bankroll the tiling for just the first three months of its operation! Meanwhile Darcy Clarke had put him in contact with a Swiss bank used by E-Branch, and Harry had made a ridiculously smal deposit - a few hundred pounds out of his remaining few thousands - to open a numbered account.