Brian Lumley - Necroscope IV - Deadspeak

Dr Bettley steepled his fingers and stared deep into the other's eyes. Harry Keogh was maybe forty-three or — four (his body, anyway) but looked five years younger. Except Bettley knew that his mind was in fact five years younger again! It was a weird business dealing with — even looking at — a man like Harry Keogh. For Bettley had known this face and body before, when it belonged to Alec Kyle.

The doctor shook his head and blinked, then deliberately avoided Harry's eyes. It was just that sometimes they could be so very soulful, those eyes of his.

As for the rest of him:

Harry's body had been well-fleshed, maybe even a little overweight, once. With its height, however, that hadn't mattered a great deal. Not to Alec Kyle, whose job with E-Branch had been in large part sedentary. But it had mattered to Harry. After that business at the Chateau Bronnitsy — his metempsychosis — he'd trained his new body down, got it to a peak of perfection. Or at least done as best he could with it, considering its age. That's why it looked only thirty-seven or — eight years old. But better still if it was only thirty-two, like the mind inside it. A very confusing business, and the doctor shook his head and blinked again.

'So what do you make of it?' Keogh asked. 'Could it be part of my problem?'

'Your problem?' Bettley repeated him. 'Oh, I'm sure it is. I'm sure it could only be part of your problem — unless of course you haven't put me fully in the picture.'

Harry raised an eyebrow.

'About your feelings towards Sandra. You've mentioned a certain ambivalence, a lack of desire, even a slackening of potency. It could be that you're taking your loss out on her — mentally, inside your head — blaming her for the fact that you're no longer…' He paused.

'A Necroscope?' Harry prompted.

'Possibly,' Bettley shrugged. 'But… on the other hand you also seem ambivalent towards your loss. I have to tell you that sometimes I get the feeling you're glad it's gone, glad you can no longer talk to… to…'

'To the dead,' said Harry, sourly. And: 'Well, you're half-right. Sometimes it's good to be just normal, ordinary. Let's face it, most people would consider me a freak, even a monster. So you're half-right. But you're also half-wrong.' He lay back in the chair again, closed his eyes and stroked his brow.

Bettley went back to studying him.

Grey streaks, so evenly spaced as to seem deliberately designed or affected, were plentiful in Harry's russet-brown, naturally wavy hair. It wouldn't be too many years before the grey overtook the brown; even now it loaned him a certain erudite appearance, gave him the look of a scholar. Ah, but in what strange and esoteric subjects? And yet Harry wasn't like that at all. What, a black magician? A 20th-century wizard? A necromancer? No, just a Necroscope, a man who talked to the dead — or used to.

Of course, he had other talents, too. Bettley looked at him sitting there, so tired-looking, his hand to his brow. The places this man had been! The means he'd used to go there, and to return. What other man had ever used an obscure mathematical concept as a… a spaceship, or a time-machine?

Harry opened his eyes and caught Bettley staring at him. He said nothing, merely stared back. That's what he was here for: to be stared at, to be examined. And Bettley was good at his job, and discreet. Everybody said so. He had many admirable qualities. Must have, else INTESP would never have taken him on. And again Harry wondered: is he still working for them? Not that it would matter a great deal, for Bettley was easy to talk to. It was just that Harry so hated subterfuge.

The doctor continued to stare into Harry's eyes. They were soulful as ever, and somehow defensive; but at the same time it seemed that Harry needed this close contact. Honey-brown, those eyes; very wide, very intelligent, and (strange beyond words) very innocent! Genuinely innocent, Bettley knew. Harry Keogh had not asked to be what he was, or to be called upon to do the things he'd done.

Bettley forced himself back to the job in hand. 'So I'm half-wrong,' he said. 'You would like your talents back, to be a "freak" again — your words, Harry. But what will you do with those talents if they do return to you? How will you use them?'

Harry gave a wry smile. His teeth were good and strong, not quite white, a little uneven; they were set in a mouth which was usually sensitive but could tighten, becoming caustic and even cruel. Or perhaps not so much cruel as unyielding, single-minded.

'You know, I scarcely knew my mother,' he dreamily answered. 'I was too young, just a baby, when she died. But I got to know her… later. And I miss her. A boy's best friend is his mum, you know? And… well, I have a lot of friends down there.'

'In the ground?'

'Yes. Hell, we had some good conversations!'

Bettley almost shuddered, fought it down. 'You miss talking to them?'

"They had their problems, wanted to air their views, wondered how things had gone in the world of the living. Some of them worried a lot, about people they'd left behind. I was able to reassure them. But most were merely lonely. Merely! But I knew what it was like for them. I could feel it. It was hell to be that lonely. They needed me; I was somebody to them; and I suppose I miss them needing me.'

'But none of this explains your dream,' the doctor mused. 'Maybe it has no explanation — except fear. You've lost your friends, your skills, those parts of yourself that made you unique. And now you're afraid of losing your manhood.'

Harry narrowed his eyes a little and began to pay more attention; he looked at Bettley more piercingly. 'Explain.'

'But isn't it obvious? A disembodied female Thing — a dead thing, a vampire thing — devours your core, the parts of you that make you a man. She was Fear, your fear, pure but not so simple. Her vampire nature was straight out of your own past experience. You don't like being normal and the more you have to endure it the more afraid of it you get to be. It's all tied up to your past, Harry: it's all the things you've lost until you're afraid of losing anything else. You lost your mother when you were a child, lost your own wife and child in an unreachable place, lost so many friends and even your own body! And finally you've lost your talents. No more Möbius Continuum, no more talking to the dead, no more Necroscope…'

Harry was frowning now. 'What you said about vampires made me remember something,' he said. 'Several things, in fact.' He went back to rubbing his brow.

'Go on,' Bettley prompted him.

'I have to start some way back,' Harry continued, 'when I was a kid at Harden Modern Boys. That's a school. I was a Necroscope even then, but it wasn't something I much liked. It used to make me dizzy, sick even. I mean it came naturally to me, but I knew it wasn't. I knew it was very unnatural. But even before that I used to… well, see things.'

Bettley was an empath; now he felt something of what Harry felt and the short hairs began to rise at the back of his neck. This was going to be important. He glanced down at a button on his side of the desk: it was still red, the tape was still running. 'What sort of things?' he asked, hiding his eagerness.

'I was an infant when my stepfather killed my mother,' the other answered. 'I wasn't on the scene, and even if I had been I wasn't old enough for it to impress me. I couldn't possibly have understood what was happening, and almost certainly I wouldn't have remembered it. And I couldn't have reconstructed it later from overheard conversations because Shukshin's account of the "accident" had been accepted. There was no question of his having murdered her — except from me. It was a nightmare I used to have: of him holding her there under the ice, until she drifted away. And I saw the ring on his finger: a cat's-eye set in a thick gold band. It came off when he drowned her and sank to the bottom of the river, and fifteen years later I knew where to go back and dive for it.'