Brian Lumley - Necroscope V - Deadspawn

This was his chance to take something belonging to the necromancer. Would there be watchers in the street? Probably. But with any luck he wouldn't be there long enough that they'd see him. 'Penny, I have to go somewhere now,' he said. 'But I'll be right back. A few minutes at most. You're to lock the doors and stay right here, in the house.' His red eyes glowed. This is my place! Only let them dare to… to… and…'

'Let who dare?' she whispered. 'E-Branch? Let them dare to what, Harry?'

'A few minutes,' he growled. 'I'll be back before you know it.'

There were watchers.

Harry chose to exit from the Möbius Continuum at the same point as the last time he'd been there, in the shadow of the wall across the alley from Pound's place. And one of the watchers was right there!

Even in the moment he stepped from the Continuum into the 'real', physical world, Harry heard the plain-clothes man's gasp and knew someone was there in the shadows with him; knew, too, that even now this unknown someone would be reaching for his gun. One big difference between them was that Harry could see perfectly well in the dark. Another was that his adversary was only a man.

Reacting in a lightning-fast movement, Harry reached out to slap the man's weapon out of his hand… and saw what kind of a 'gun' it was which the other had produced from under his coat. A crossbow! He knocked it away anyway, sent it clattering on the cobbles, and held the esper by his throat against the wall.

The man was terrified. A prognosticator — a reader of future times — he had known that Harry would come here. That had been as far as he could see; but he'd also known that his own life-thread went on beyond this point. Which had seemed to mean that if there was trouble, Harry would be on the receiving end.

The Necroscope read these things right out of the esper's gibbering mind, and his voice was a clotted gurgle as he told him: 'Reading the future's a dangerous game. So you're going to live, are you? Well, maybe. But what as? A man — or a vampire?' He tilted his head a little on one side and smiled at the other through eyes burning like coals under a bellows' blast, and in the next moment stopped smiling and showed him his teeth.

The esper saw the gape — the impossible gape — of Harry's jaws, and gagged as the vampire's steel fingers tightened on his windpipe. In his mind he was screaming, Oh, Jesus! I'm dead — dead!

'You could be,' Harry told him. 'You could oh so easily be. It rather depends on how well we get on. Now tell me: who killed Darcy Clarke?'

The man, short and sturdy, balding and narrow-eyed, used both hands to try to loosen Harry's grip on his throat. It was useless. Turning purple, still he managed to shake his head, refusing to answer the Necroscope's question with anything but a gurgle. But Harry read it in his mind anyway.

Paxton! That vicious, slimy…

At that Harry's fury filled him to bursting. It would be so easy to just tighten his grip until this staggering shit's Adam's apple turned to mush in his hand… but that would be to punish him for what someone else had done. Also, it would be to pander to the monster raging inside him.

Instead he tossed the man away from him, took a deep breath and breathed a vampire mist. By the time the esper was able to prop himself on one elbow against the wall, choking and massaging his throat, the mist lay over the alley like a shroud and Harry had disappeared into it -

— Or rather through it, and through the Möbius Continuum into Johnny Pound's flat.

He knew he didn't have a lot of time; it depended how many men the Branch had up here — they could be coming through the main door of the building right now. And they'd be equipped with all the right gear, too. A crossbow is a hellishly ugly weapon, but a flamethrower is far worse!

Pound's flat was grimy as a pigsty and smelled just as bad. Harry moved through it without touching, thinking: Even my shoes will feel unclean.

First he checked the door. It was sturdy as hell, made of heavy old-fashioned oak hung on massive hinges, fitted with three locks and, on the inside, two large bolts. Obviously Johnny hadn't intended that anyone should break in; which sufficed to make Harry feel a little safer, too. He quickly moved on.

In the front room, before a small, grimy window overlooking the now quiet road, he paused beside a cheap writing desk. One drawer was half-open; Harry glimpsed a metallic sheen from inside but was distracted by the items on top of the desk: a creased, stained, huge-breasted Samantha Fox calendar, with today's date ringed in biro alongside some scribbled marginalia, and a hand-scrawled message on a sheet of A4 bearing the Frigis Express logo. The calendar didn't seem especially important… at least, not until Harry had read the message on the A4:

Johnny -

Tonight. A London run. Your 'lucky charm' truck, which I'll have loaded for you. Pick her up at the depot 11:40. It's for Parkinson's in Slough. They'll be dressing it for Heathrow Suppliers starting first thing in the morning, so we can't be late with this. Sorry for late notice. If you can't make it, let me know soonest.

The note was signed in some indecipherable scrawl, but Harry didn't need to know who had signed it. The date at the top was today's. Johnny had a London run tonight, leaving the Darlington depot at 11:40.

Now Harry looked at the calendar again. In the margin opposite the ringed date, Found had scribbled: 'London run! Good, 'cos I feel lucky and this could be my night. And I need to fuck inside a tit…'

Glancing at his watch, Harry saw that it was 11:30. Johnny was at the depot right now.

The Necroscope came to a decision there and then. His mad quarry used a Frigis Express truck (his 'lucky charm' truck) as a prop in his crazed games of sex, murder and necromancy; and so the truck should likewise feature in his punishment. Very well, tonight would be Johnny's last run. And now all Harry needed was an item from the lunatic's personal belongings.

He yanked the desk drawer open the rest of the way, and a half-dozen heavy metal tubes jumped in their velvet-lined compartments. Harry looked at them and thought, What the…? But as he carefully lifted one of the tubes out of the drawer he knew well enough what the…

The thing was a weapon, which Found himself must have made or had manufactured, for use on his victims. Or for use on one of them, anyway. A name had been painted with a small brush in black enamel on the shining metal: Penny. And Harry thought, This was what went into Penny, before Found went into her.

The weapon fitted Pamela Trotter's description perfectly. A section of steel tubing about an inch and a half internal diameter, one end was cut square and had a rubber sheath or hand-grip, and the other end was cut diagonally to a point. That was the cutting edge of the tool and its rim had been filed from the inside out to a razor's sharpness. The Necroscope already knew how — and why — such a hideous knife would be used. The very thought of it was sickening.

As a kid Harry had played in the deep snows of England's north-east coast. When he was quite small he'd love just to sit there in the piled snow with an old tin can, driving the open end plop into the cold, soft white bank. When you pulled the can out again it would be full of snow; short fat cylinders of snow, from which you could build castles like on the beach. Except unlike sandcastles, which melted away when the tide came in, these castles would last for days until the weather warmed up. But it wasn't the castles he pictured now but the perfectly circular holes which the can had used to leave in the snow. In his mind's eye he could see those holes even now… and they were crimson. And they weren't cut in snow.