The Last Aerie

  Ian Goodly’s gaunt frame loomed in the open door. He must have heard something of the conversation, for now he entered and said, “Mr. Bryant is right: he can’t help. Nathan’s math has achieved such a level that he can now be left to develop on his own. Mr. Bryant will be out of here by this afternoon. And anyway, Nathan has work to do. It’s coming, Ben. It’s NZ time. A week at most, and we’ll be dealing with that again.”

  Only Trask knew what he meant. Zek hadn’t been here long enough, and as yet Bryant wasn’t entirely convinced that this place was part of the real world. But “NZ” was their code for the Nightmare Zone, which was a place right here in London.

  The small hairs on the back of Trask’s neck were suddenly erect. Despite the comfortable temperature of the heated room, he visibly shuddered as his gaze transferred from Bryant to Goodly, and he asked, “You’ve seen it coming?”

  “Yes.” Goodly was like a ghost standing there, features painted on his skull and his eyes sunk deep in their sockets, his voice a high-pitched, nervous warble.

  “When?”

  “Within a week. I didn’t try to narrow it down. But it’s going to be bad. It almost scared the shit out of me!”

  It wasn’t usual for Ian Goodly to use that sort of term, so Trask knew that he had more on his hands than any problem presented by Bryant’s quitting. In any case the precog had foreseen that, so it was going to happen.

  “Mr. Bryant, you’re out of it,” Trask told him. And you may believe me, you’re better off for it. “You can do whatever is necessary to finish up your work here. You will be paid for the full term of your contract, of course. But I would remind you, you’re sworn to secrecy—always.”

  Bryant nodded, said, “Er … good-bye, then.”

  And when he was out of the office: “A meeting.” Trask was back in action, the way he liked it. “Ten minutes, the Ops Room. Whoever you can muster from those in the building—oh, and Nathan, of course.”

  For this time there was no question about it. This time they were going to need the Necroscope …

  Those gathered in the Ops Room were Frank Robinson, a spotter, Paul Garvey, a full-blown telepath, Ben Trask, Zek Föener, Ian Goodly, Nathan, and the empath Geoff Smart who was just back from a stint in Glasgow’s Barlinnie Prison and a study of its psychopaths. This had been a Ministry of Health job—a feasibility study in treatment and rehabilitation—but something less than healthy for Smart. After three months of close contact with the worst inmates of Barlinnie, Smart looked as if he could use some help himself.

  “If I draw NZ,” he’d whispered to Goodly where they gathered in the Ops Room, “it will be peaceful by comparison.” But in actual fact the mere thought of the Nightmare Zone made the flesh of each and every one of them crawl.

  With the exception of the duty officer, all of the above—the entire on-duty staff of E-Branch HQ, excluding Nathan’s minders, who weren’t espers—were present as Trask took the podium. Leaning on the lectern, he told them, “Ian Goodly has forecast trouble in the Nightmare Zone. Within the week. He says it’s going to be bad. Now some of you have done this duty before, and others have been lucky. The same goes for a couple of agents who aren’t here right now, out on field duty or resting at home. But when it’s NZ time, all the names go into the hat.”

  In fact it wasn’t a hat but a deck of cards. Trask took the deck out from under the lectern’s lid and shuffled it in full view of the assembled agents, telling them, “Anyone who already did the job more than once can cry off. No one will blame him. Anyone else who doesn’t fancy it can speak up now and we’ll try not to blame him.” He looked from face to face but no one so much as twitched.

  “Zek,” Trask went on, “you’re sort of honorary here and so you don’t have a card. Nathan, you’re in on this job like it or not. I’ll explain in a little while, and then you’ll understand why everyone is so quiet. So that leaves three to choose. Who has the tally sheet?”

  Ian Goodly said, “I have it.” The sheet matched up names to cards; the first three names out of the deck were it; Trask stopped shuffling and turned up the top card.

  “Three of hearts,” he said.

  Goodly shook his head.

  “Seven of diamonds.”

  The same reaction from Goodly.

  “Jack of clubs … ah!” It was Trask’s card. He had only done the job once before, and anyway he wouldn’t have wanted to shirk his duty. “That’s me. OK, two to go.”

  He went back to turning cards, and the next one up was the queen of hearts. It drew a blank. And:

  “Ace of clubs.”

  “That’s me.” Paul Garvey wore an emotionless expression—always. With his remodeled face, the nerves not quite matching, smiles and frowns alike came out as grotesque grimaces.

  Trask drew two more blanks and then the four of spades.

  “That’s Anna Marie English,” Goodly said, “but I know for a fact that she’s already done it twice.”

  Trask looked again at the faces of his espers. “I’m sending Anna Marie out to Romania, and soon, to take charge of the Refuge. So … I vote we draw again.”

  No one objected, and seven cards later the ace of hearts brought a small groan from Geoff Smart.

  Trask looked at Goodly, who nodded. “It’s Smart,” he said. And to Smart himself: “How many times have you done it, Geoff?”

  “Just the once,” Smart answered. “Which is three times as often as I wanted to!”

  Smart was five-ten, blockily built, red-haired and crew-cut. He looked like a pugilist but in fact was mild-mannered. What he lacked in looks was made up for by what Trask called his “withness,” his empathy, an intense ability to relate. He didn’t just feel for a person but became him, experienced his emotions, pains, passions. It was something he could switch on and off like a light, which was as well. There were minds in Barlinnie no one would want to relate to for too long.

  “Well, that’s the four of us,” he now said, “and the off-duties don’t even know how lucky they’ve been! I suppose we’re confined to this place until a hunchman says it’s time, right?”

  From the podium, Trask nodded. “You, me, Paul, and Nathan, we’re it. And when we get the signal from either Ian Goodly or Guy Teale—hopefully with just a little time to play with—then we enter the Nightmare Zone. Teale will have to be called in, if he’s not already on his way, and, Ian … you’ll need to be on hand as the time narrows down. I want as much warning as possible.” And as Goodly opened his mouth to make his usual comment: “Yes, I know: the future isn’t reliable. But it is your precinct, so work on it.”

  And now for the first time Nathan spoke up. “Just what is this Nightmare Zone, and why do you all fear it?”

  Trask took a deep breath, said, “This is for you and Zek. For you because you’ll be in it, and for Zek because she has no experience of it. But occasionally something happens that stops even people like us; something so weird, so extraordinary as to defy all explanations. So … really I don’t have any explanation for it, except that it happens.

  “That’s what E-Branch has been about right from the start: the inexplicable, the outré, the macabre. In the beginning we were mindspies; we still are, to an extent, and possibly more so in the immediate future, but in between we’ve sidetracked into all sorts of fields. All sorts of minefields, too! Gadgets and ghosts, that’s us and always has been. But sometimes our ghosts do more than just rattle chains …

  “Nathan, you’re the Necroscope, so maybe it won’t be so hard for you to understand or believe. Zek, you know some of the things we’ve had to deal with in the past; it’s possible you’d accept this too, without letting it get to you. Mercifully you’re not involved. As for the people who have had to deal with it—afterwards, when it’s all over, they really do nightmare! Maybe that’s why we call it the Nightmare Zone, and now I’ll tell you how it started …

  “John Scofield was one of our agents. He was the son of a psychic medium, just like Harry Keogh. And John radiated hi
s ESP like a lighthouse beacon on a dark night. Our spotters could feel him coming a mile away, he had that much power. Well, we thought maybe we had a Necroscope here, but we were wrong.

  “The power we felt in him wasn’t … what, supernatural? I suppose that’s what most people would call messages from beyond the grave. No, his real talent was more properly parapsychological. In fact he was telekinetic: a mover. Not a ‘nice’ mover, but someone who could shift things with his mind. Think about that. Maybe eventually he’d be able to shift himself, do teleportation with his mind, like Harry with his Möbius doors.

  “As for John’s deadspeak: I still believe it was in him but I don’t think it would ever have amounted to very much … not while he was alive, anyway.

  “We had him for a year and put a lot into him, hoping that eventually we’d get a lot out. We didn’t take our work lightly: on the contrary, we knew what an awesome weapon we would have if it all worked out. What’s more, we knew that old adage about absolute power.

  “More about his deadspeak: John believed that the dead talked to him, usually in his sleep. Now, we know from the Keogh files that this is possible in the case of a Necroscope. And Nathan has affirmed that it’s so. But when we put our best espers on John’s case they came up with nothing, or at best the very faintest echoes. His talents were less than obvious when he was asleep. And we had to ask ourselves: is his deadspeak real or is he simply dreaming, fantasizing? Remember, his mother had been a psychic medium—a fake, it would appear—but she had thought she was real. Was her son’s delusion, if that’s what it was, something which had come down to him from her? Or did he have deadspeak but in an as yet undeveloped form, which would grow with time?

  “Now the other side of him, his telekinesis: John was one of the luckiest men alive—within certain parameters. And here I’m talking about London’s casinos. When it came down to dice or roulette wheels … let it suffice to say that he got himself banned from most of the casinos by the time he was twenty-one years old. And he was ‘lucky’ with the one-armed bandits, too. Enough that he made a living from his gambling. But an honest day’s work? John Scofield never did one in his life! I’m not moralizing, just stating a fact.

  “John didn’t get it right every time, but when he was on form it was devastating. I’ve seen him roll ten pairs of sixes in a row, just for practice. And I’ve watched the little white ball drop into fifteen consecutive red slots before his concentration failed him. Perhaps the best ‘trick’ he ever performed for me was to move a sheet of paper across a desk, or to close a door, slowly, quietly, just by looking at it. But all these examples were mainly harmless things … while he was alive. I know I keep saying that, but you’ll see why in a little while.

  “So he came to us—we spotted and recruited him—three years ago this coming April, and we had him for a year. Until it happened. John had a wife and child. He’d married his sweetheart at nineteen and had a little boy eight years old. I met his family on several occasions and Lynn was stunning. The kid, too, a jewel of a boy. And I never knew a man more in love with his wife than John Scofield.

  “They lived in North London, the Highbury area. One morning after a stint as duty officer, John went home and found the house broken into, his wife and child dead. It looked like the kid had tried to protect his mother, and someone had kicked his head in. As for Lynn: she’d been stripped, tortured, raped, and after a lot of suffering her killer had choked her with her own underclothes, which he’d stuffed with a madman’s strength down her throat …

  “And of course John came to us for help. Not immediately, for there was help other than ours which he needed first. The psychiatric sort. No question about it, he was out of his mind for … oh, a long time. Six months at least. But eventually he got it together again, or so we thought, and then he came to us.

  “Along with some cash, Lynn’s jewelry had been taken. A few good pieces had been stolen, and some lesser stuff. But the thief’s mistake was that he left any of it behind. It had all belonged to Lynn, and even the lesser or worthless pieces carried her aura. We gave some of it to David Chung, which was akin to putting a piece of soiled clothing under the nose of a bloodhound!

  “When Chung came up with a location, we checked it out and ended up with the name of a fence with a track record as long as your arm. After that, our part of the job was complete and we handed the case over to the police, gave it to them on a plate. But what we didn’t know was that we’d also given it to John on a plate. We had thought he’d straightened out, but he hadn’t. He wanted the murderer of his wife and child. John wanted him personally.

  “It was a close-run thing. The police grilled the fence we’d given them. He still had items of Lynn’s jewelry, and finally coughed. When they went to pick up the perp from his place in Finsbury Park, John was right behind them. He followed them to a police station in the same area, and was immediately behind them when they took their man in for questioning.

  “The perp was as nasty a piece of work as you could wish to find on the streets of London, or any other place for that matter. His name was Tod Prentiss and he had lots of previous. Armed robbery, GBH, burglary, a rape on a young kid that he’d so far got away with. Also, the police had found a couple of pieces of Lynn’s junk jewelry in his flat.

  “Inside the police station John saw the evidence, knew that this was his man—and cracked. He’d taken a cutthroat razor with him, and went for Prentiss to kill him! The desk officer had a gun. He made to produce it but Prentiss beat him to it, started shooting. He wounded two officers who got between him and Scofield, before a plainclothes man with a handgun of his own came on the scene. In the shoot-out that followed Prentiss was hit in the heart and died on the spot. And if John Scofield had been a little bit crazy before, now he really went over the top. God only knows what was in his mind at that moment! But we all know what’s been in it ever since—and what’s in it right now!

  “Because that was when he took his cutthroat razor and put it to his own throat, and sliced as deep as he could go without actually sawing his own head off!

  “Why did he do it? Well, we’ve thought about that …

  “You see, whether we believed in John or not—in his deadspeak, I mean—he believed in it, just like his mother had believed before him. Also, he’d read the Keogh files and knew there are worlds beyond. Now that’s a concept which it’s still very hard for us to accept. Despite that we knew Harry and now have his son right here in our midst, it still feels very strange to us that death isn’t the end, that whatever a man was and did in life, he continues to be and do in his afterlife. The reason it’s hard for us is that we’re still very much alive. Who knows? Maybe the closer we get to it, the more we’ll be willing to believe.

  “But as I said, John Scofield did believe. In fact, John knew that Tod Prentiss had got off too light, too quick and easy, and that his evil incorporeal mind was still thinking its evil incorporeal thoughts among all the generally clean thoughts of the Great Majority!

  “He knew that Prentiss would be thinking of the girls he’d raped and one in particular whom he’d murdered, getting his mental rocks off on thoughts of Lynn’s sweet body before he soiled it and stilled the air in its lungs and the blood in its veins. But worse than all that, John knew that Lynn was there! She was there in Prentiss’s dead world, where even now the evil bastard might be whispering to her in the endless night of the tomb, telling her how good it had been for him and reminding her of the hell he’d put her through! And that’s why John had cracked.

  “For while Tod Prentiss had been put beyond John’s reach in this world, he was still very much ‘alive’ and perhaps even available in the next. And what was there left for John here? Not even revenge, not now. But down among the teeming dead … ? His cutthroat razor had been John’s visa into a world where he would continue to pursue what he’d pursued here. In this world he had practiced his deadspeak, perhaps with some small measure of success; we’ve no way of knowing now. But he’d also use
d telekinesis. Maybe that, too, would have its incorporeal uses. The ability to move things with the power of the mind alone … And since mind would be all John had left, there would be nothing to distract him from his main pursuit:

  “The pursuit of a man called Tod Prentiss!

  “At the rear of the police station, where the final act in this drama—or what ought to have been the final act—had taken place, stood a morgue. In fact the morgue joined the police station to an old, brick-built Victorian hospital, and served both institutions or facilities equally well. As the mess got sorted out, both John’s and Prentiss’s bodies were put in cold storage there. And by that simple act—the placing in close proximity of these two dead bodies—the police brought into being the Nightmare Zone.

  “That night the duties consisted of a desk sergeant and his radio op assistant, a two-man standby patrol, and a car on prowler duty. It wasn’t one of the big stations. Some old down-and-out—a drunk with nowhere better to go—was snoring in one corner of the inquiries room; all in all it was quiet, and not a lot was happening. Nothing odd about that, for after all it was a wintry Wednesday night, and the streets were empty.

  “All admin attended to, the sergeant joined his standby crew in a three-handed game of cards behind the desk, and the time crept round to midnight. Which was when things began to happen.

  “First of all, it grew cold. That was hard to understand. Despite that it was bitter outside, the station was centrally heated and the heating turned up full. But the cold came seeping from the rear of the station, out of the wide, tiled, cell-lined corridor that led like a tunnel to the morgue. Back there was a door to that silent, grisly place, and on the other side of the morgue another door to the basement of the hospital. Of course at this time of night both doors were locked, and they would stay locked until the morning … unless there should be business to attend to in the interim.