But despite that he had deliberately left his answerphone disconnected, his sleep hadn’t been disturbed except by recurrent nightmares, the substance or bulk of which, as usual, he couldn’t remember on waking … except for one thing, one face, one fear-filled visage in his mind’s eye that continued pleading with him even after he was awake:
“H-h-h-help meeeeeee!”
The yellow man, or youth, as Harry now seemed to remember him from his—what, precognitive?—visitation. But was that really what it had been? Was that all it had been? Alec Kyle’s talent resurfacing again after all this time? Some kind of warning presience? Somehow Harry didn’t think so, not this time.
Yellow men … Tibetan priests or monks … The monastery on the frozen plateau … And the leader of those red-robes in London that time, taking pictures at the scene of the bombing in Oxford Street … And the same group, or another just like it, in the Forest of Atholl.
All of these things, yes—
—But what else did Harry know about them?
And his Ma: she hadn’t come to his rescue or “interfered” this time. When the telephone had been a wolf—(God! But the Necroscope felt dizzy! Whirled along on his own wild thoughts, he could hardly believe he was turning such stuff over in his mind, having this conversation with himself!)—but when the telephone was a wolf his mother had come on like the cavalry! So why not this time? What if she hadn’t been able to on this occasion? And why wasn’t he able to hear the dead conversing in their graves, which was as “usual” or “normal” to Harry as real-life background conversation in a crowded room to a normal man?
But when he thought about it, at least that was something he could figure out for himself.
It wasn’t his Ma, wasn’t the Great Majority who had given up on him, it was Harry who had given up on them! It was this … this some-damn-thing inside him that didn’t want him talking to them, and it was getting worse all the time. This need in him to protect his secret talents, his powers as a Necroscope and his use of the Möbius Continuum. He was like an addict obscuring his addiction, learning how not to give himself away. A difficult thing when using the Möbius Continuum, for his physical movements on entering into or exiting from the Continuum might easily be observed, but very much simpler in the case of his commerce with the teeming dead; for that was metaphysical, mental, invisible. He had simply erected barriers in his mind, shields that had always been there, which alone allowed him to lead a normal existence. Except now they were there permanently; for without even realizing that he had done it—and even now not sure—it was possible that he’d left those barriers in place and so cut himself off from the dead.
After a late breakfast, coffee and a bowl of cereal, the Necroscope had tested the theory, opened his mind and instinctively tuned in to that ethereal “waveband” to which he alone had access. Letting it flow through him, he had known at once that he was right. For they were there as always, the whispering dead, the Great Majority, talking to each other from their unseen, unknown graves across the world. But before they could sense him or feel the warmth of his lonely flame flickering in their long night, he had reinstated his barriers to shut them out.
But why? Why do that to them, when the teeming dead were the only real friends Harry had ever had? The answer was simplicity itself: the best way to keep a secret hidden forever is to lock it away where it can never be discovered. This secret was locked in the Necroscope’s head, and if he threw away the only key … that was where it would stay.
Then for a while he had known regret, remorse, even something of surprise, at himself—that he was so ready, willing, and able to discard so much of what had been good in his life. But he knew that whatever else he did he must not risk anyone else finding out about his talents.
He couldn’t tell anyone about them, display them, or—
—Or use them? Yes, and it might even come down to that, eventually. And what hope would he have then of finding Brenda and his boy? None, he supposed. So maybe he should get on with the search for them—involve himself personally in it again—white he still could. Which seemed like another good reason (a valid one, anyway) for getting himself out of this old house.
As for Bonnie Jean’s reasons: Harry didn’t even know what they were, exactly. Something she feared? Something he should fear … ?
At which moment, as he’d pushed his plate away and stood up, the telephone had jangled in his study. And that was maybe something he should fear. Or something he should fight, whichever.
Harry had breakfasted in his kitchen. At first the sound of the phone had frozen him rigid; then he had taken a moment or two to unfreeze, decide what to do and get mobile, and several seconds more to make his way to his study. And all of the time the telephone had kept on ringing.
After that … he’d found himself snatching at the thing, no longer giving himself time to wonder or worry about it but doing it. And even in full daylight, or as full as it ever got to be this time of year, still Harry had felt the short hairs rising at the back of his neck, and the creep of his flesh as he anticipated the Unknown …
… Feelings which were still with him when he’d heard:
“Harry, is that you?” Darcy Clarke, his voice made tinny by the two or three inches Harry held the phone away from his ear, his face. At first he had failed to recognize his caller, partly because it had been so long, and also because he’d been expecting … well, almost anything else! But then:
“Darcy,” he had answered, almost gasping his relief as he flopped into his chair. “It’s … it’s good to hear from you!” And that was something he really hadn’t expected to say again, not and really mean it.
Darcy was quick on the uptake, as usual. “Harry, is anything wrong?”
“Wrong?”
“You sound—I don’t know—sort of tense?”
“I was expecting a call from, oh, someone else. So what’s on your mind?” He had tried to sound as much at ease as possible, but at the same time had realized that he wasn’t the only one who sounded “sort of tense.” And his heart—and his guts—had given a lurch as he asked: “Is it Brenda?”
“Brenda?” As if nothing could have been further from Darcy’s mind—which after all this time might well be the case. “Oh, Brenda! No, no it’s not your wife. Harry, it’s something else. And we have to talk—I mean face to face. And I do mean we have to talk!”
Well, and Harry had wanted to get out of the house, hadn’t he? “A talk? You want to talk to me?” But his voice had turned sour in a moment. “Just a talk?”
“For the moment, yes.”
“Not about Brenda and my son?”
“No … and if I may say so, it’s bigger than that. Don’t give me a hard time over this, Harry. I mean, considering what I’ve just said, you have to know now that it really is big.”
“What if I tell you I don’t much care?”
“And what if I tell you that you’d better care? This time it’s not just the Branch, Harry. It could be everything …”
Everything was a lot, especially if Darcy Clarke said so. “And it’s something you need my help with?”
“Maybe,” Darcy sounded uncertain. “But on the other hand, it could be that you need ours …”
Harry had thought about that, briefly, before answering, “There’s a train out of Waverly Station about midday. I’ll be on it.” It wasn’t that he had simply accepted Darcy’s argument, or given in to the veiled threat, but … who could say? Maybe the Branch had the answers to some of his many questions.
“A train?” Darcy had seemed surprised and Harry knew why. But his thing, his obsession, was really starting to take control now.
“A train, yes,” he had snapped. “What, and did you think I would walk it?” With which he’d put the phone down …
His train had got into King’s Cross a little before 5:00 in the evening, but there’d been E-Branch or Special Branch men aboard from Darlington on down the line. Harry had seen them and known who they were, but
said nothing. They had sat close but not too close, just keeping their eyes on him. Only a handful of people would have noticed, but the Necroscope had had plenty of experience of just such people. So, were they escorting, protecting him? Obviously the first, probably the second. But from what? “Something big,” as Darcy Clarke would have it.
Darcy himself, Head of Branch, had met him at King’s Cross, driven him to headquarters in the heart of the city. Which was where they were now …
Despite all of Darcy’s efforts to the contrary, he was nervous as a cat. He had problems aplenty, all of which were or seemed connected to the Necroscope to one extent or another. He could have had him watched at home, of course, but he had long since promised Harry that he wouldn’t interfere with him or his son, if ever they should find him, and he wasn’t about to break his word. So since Harry was a “friend” of the Branch, this seemed the best way: a face to face confrontation.
In fact there had been no other route. Or there had been, but that was a route Darcy would avoid at all costs. The other way would have been to tell the Minister Responsible about Harry’s possible involvement in certain matters, sit back and let him make the decisions.
But in the past Darcy’s dealings with that specific government body had taught him a number of valuable lessons: not least that it could be … well, heavy-handed to say the least. He was well aware that “in the best interests of the country,” even innocent men were occasionally expendable. But the Necroscope Harry Keogh wouldn’t be one of them, not while Darcy was Head of E-Branch.
The Branch was housed in, or on, a hotel; the elevator at the rear stopped on an extra floor, the top floor, E-Branch HQ. Ben Trask was pacing the long corridor when the elevator doors hissed open and Harry and Darcy stepped out. Trask fell in with them in a moment, his gruff greeting, “Hi, Darcy, Harry!” echoing in a place whose offices were more than half-empty. It was after five and most of Darcy’s staff had gone to their homes; which was just as well, because the business in hand was on a strictly need-to-know basis. And:
“Ops room,” Darcy said, leading the way. Enroute from the station he had said very little. When he’d spoken at all it was to ask Harry how his search was going, which the Necroscope had answered with a shake of his head. Darcy had desperately wanted to ask, “Why the train?” but had held it in. That was what they were going to find out. That … and hopefully one or two other things. Or hopefully not.
The ops room was empty, gloomy, sterile-looking. Darcy put on the lights, dragged three steel chairs around a table, threw his coat on another chair and sat down. Harry and Ben Trask followed suit. And when they were seated:
“So what’s going on?” Harry looked from to face, taking in the little tell-tale changes. Not that Darcy Clarke ever changed a lot, not that you’d notice. He was still the world’s most nondescript man, middling in every way except for his weird talent, that “guardian angel” that kept him out of trouble and made him the ideal man for the job. As for Trask: if anything, he looked younger! A human lie-detector, the last three or four years had tightened him up a little, sharpened him, taken away his jaded, lugubrious look. Or perhaps it was the job … or maybe it was whatever this was now.
“You mean you can’t tell us?” Darcy leaned forward, looked him straight in the eye. “See, the fact is we don’t know what’s going on. We were hoping you would, and that you’d want to tell us about it.”
Ben reached out and let his hand fall on Darcy’s arm. “You said you were going to tell him straight,” he said.
And Harry said: “So that you could judge my reaction, eh, Ben? What is this, good-cop, bad-cop? Or is it just inquisitor and adjudicator? He asks the questions and you tell him if I’m lying or not?”
They said nothing and Harry began to stand up. But Darcy said, “Harry, don’t. Please don’t. If you walk out on us, then it’s out of my hands …” The way he said it—so cold, yet at the same time brokenly, as if he had to force the words out—made Harry sit down again.
“And whose hands will it be in, whatever it is?”
“Harry, we’re covering for you,” Ben took the opportunity to put in. “For a long time now you haven’t been straight with us.” But his voice, too, was shaky, because he knew that for a long time now they hadn’t been straight with Harry. Which went against Trask’s grain. It wasn’t just that you couldn’t lie to him, but also that he didn’t like telling lies. Not even white lies or half-truths. And to him not telling something—hiding something, especially from a friend—was tantamount to lying about it.
“Covering for me?” Harry said, uncertainly. And again he looked from one to the other. Then, shaking his head, “Well I’m sorry but you’ve lost me right from square one!” And angry now: “I mean, what the hell am I supposed to have done?”
Ben Trask was staring right at him; he blinked and looked at Darcy. “I can’t read a thing. There isn’t one lying hair on Harry’s head, not where we’re concerned. A lot of uncertainty, soul-searching, but no deliberate mendacity.” And to Harry: “It could be you kept something back that time four years ago, but you certainly aren’t doing it now.” Then he frowned. “Not that you’re aware of, anyway …” Then back to Darcy again, “So do it the way you said you would, and tell it to him straight.”
And Darcy sighed (gladly, Harry thought), and said, “Very well.” And to the Necroscope: “Harry, all sorts of things are going down, and we don’t have a clue what it’s all about. When we’ve told you about it, then you’ll understand why we thought you might be involved. And then, too, you might be able to suggest something. Or maybe we can work it out together.”
Before they could begin the Duty Officer looked in, asking if they would like coffee. Darcy said yes, and they sat in silence until he had brought it in. Then Darcy told him to see to it they weren’t disturbed, and after he’d left they got down to it …
Leaving everything else out for the moment, Darcy went straight to the story of the bomb in Hyde Park. And Ben Trask, of course, monitored Harry’s reaction: blank astonishment at first—then something quite different.
The Necroscope’s universe reeled and he knew what was coming. He had just commenced saying: “What? A nuclear device? In Hyde …” when it happened.
His face went pale; he clutched the rim of the table and groaned, “Oh, no!”
Darcy and Ben flanked him in a moment, their hands on his shoulders. “Harry?”
“Leave it,” he gasped. “I know what it is and it’ll pass.” Well maybe, but not right now. For instead the room, the operations room, “passed” right out of existence! And:
Everything was white! So white, so blinding white, that he gasped with the hurt of it, closed his eyes and turned his face away—and a moment later felt a slap. The hard slap of a cold, gritty hand, or a handful of ice—like a snowball with a rock in it, such as the colliery kids had used to make when he was a boy—on his face, stinging it. And then a punch, or rather a body-blow, full body, as if someone had slammed a giant door on him. It picked him up, spun him head over heels like a leaf in a gale, hurled him down in a deep snowdrift, so that he left a man-shaped depression where he broke through the thin crust and crunched down deep into the snow.
And overhead, suddenly, there was a wind! A gale! A hurricane, as the white light turned red and sound, momentarily suspended, returned—with a vengeance!
A crackling of electricity; a tracery of electrical fires racing across the sky; a rumbling born out of nothing that grew louder and louder until it was deafening! And then the debris, dirt, snow and ice, chunks of rock, a horizontal avalanche passing over Harry where he hugged himself down and tried to disappear into his hole in the snowdrift.
It went on for long seconds, and when it was done and the ground stopped shuddering …
Harry got to his knees, looked out of the trench he’d compressed into the snow … looked out on an awesome scene. Near-distant, some two or three miles across a dirty grey desolation a low, squat mushroom cloud bulged upwards
, still expanding. At its base, ground zero was hidden in the boiling flame-shot stem where rocks and rubble were still tumbling from the sky. And as a backdrop, gaunt grey mountains capped with white marched into a familiar distance.
“What … ?”he said. And:
“What?” Darcy Clarke echoed him. “Are you OK, Harry?”
And the ops room was there all around him.
For a while he couldn’t speak, licked his lips, was glad, (a hell of an understatement!) to be back. Not that he’d been anywhere; not his body, anyway. Another of Alec Kyle’s bloody indecipherable precognitions, it must have been. Brought on by all the talk of an atomic bomb in Hyde Park. And he spoke the thought out loud even as it came to him: “One of Alec’s glimpses into the future.”
Trask knew the truth when he heard it. “You’ve retained a part of Alec?”
“We thought that had left you by now,” Darcy put in. “How would we know any different? We’re never in touch these days.”
Still disoriented, Harry reeled, clutched at the desk. He looked at their concerned faces where they flanked him, realized that what Darcy had said was true: that these were friends, real friends, and he’d been too long out of touch. And steadying himself, he blurted, “The fact is I’m a total fuck-up! Alec Kyle? He’s only a small part of it. But yes, I still have something of him in me—which I don’t understand any more than he did! That was an example of it: a bomb blast—a nuclear blast, was how it seemed to me—out of some unknown future …”
… Future! Future! Future!
And the world reeled again!
“Jesus!” Harry gasped, as the room started to rotate, and Darcy and Ben grabbed his shoulders, holding him still.