Harry Keogh Now: Ex-Necroscope

Harry woke up knowing that something was happening or about to happen.

He was propped up in the huge old bed where he'd nodded off, his head again st the headboard, a fat, black-bound book open in his slack hands. The Book of the Vampire: a so-called 'factual treatise' which examined the elementa l evil of the vampire down through all the ages to modern times. It was lig ht reading for the Necroscope, and many of its 'well-authenticated cases' l ittle more than grotesque jokes; for no one in the world - with one possibl e exception - knew more about the legend, the source, the truth of vampiris m than Harry Keogh. That one exception was his son, also called Harry, exce pt that Harry Jnr didn't count because in fact he wasn't 'in' this world at all but . . . somewhere else.

Harry had been dreaming an old, troubled dream: one which mingled his l ife and loves of fifteen years gone by with those of the here and now, turn ing them into a surreal kaleidoscope of eroticism. He had dreamed of loving Helen, his first groping (mental as well as physical) s.e.xual experience; a nd of Brenda, his first true love and the wife of his youth; so that howeve r strange and overlapping, these had been sweet and familiar dreams, and te nder. But he had also dreamed of the Lady Karen and her monstrous aerie in the world of the Wamphyri, and it seemed likely that this was the dreadful dream which had started him awake.

But somewhere in there had been dreams of Sandra, too, his new and - he hoped - lasting love affair, which because of its freshness was more vivid, real and immediate than the others. It had taken the sting of poignancy from some of the dream, and the cold clutch of horror from the rest of it.

That was what he had been dreaming about: making love to the women h e had known, and to one he knew now. And also of making love to the Lady Karen, whom mercifully he had never known - not in that way.

But Sandra . . . they'd made love before on several occasions - no, on m any occasions, though rarely satisfactorily - always at her place in Edinbur gh, in the turned-down green glow of her bedside lamp. Not satisfactory for Harry, anyway; of course he couldn't speak for Sandra. He suspected, though, that she loved him dearly.

He had never let her know about his - dissatisfaction? Not merely beca use he didn't want to hurt her, more especially because it would only serv e to highlight his own deficiency. A deficiency, yes, and yet at the same time something of a paradox. Because by comparison with other men (Harry w as not so naive as to believe there had been no others) he supposed that to Sandra he must seem almost superhuman.

He could make love to her for an hour, sometimes longer, before bringin g himself to climax. But he was not superhuman, at least not in that sense.

It was simply that in bed he couldn't seem to get switched on to her. When he came, always it was with some other woman in his mind's eye. Any other woman: the friend of a friend or some brief, chance encounter; some cover g irl or other; even the small girl Helen from his childhood, or the wife Bre nda from his early manhood. A h.e.l.l of a thing to admit about the woman you think you love, and who you're fairly sure loves you!

His deficiency, obviously, for Sandra was very beautiful. Indeed, Harry should consider himself a lucky man - everybody said so. Maybe it was the cool, green, subdued lighting of her bedroom that turned him off: he didn't really care for green. And her eyes were greenish, too. Or a greeny-blue, anyway.

That's why her part of this dream had been so different: in it they ha d made love and it had been good. He had been close to climax when he woke up ... when he'd come awake knowing that something was about to happen.

He woke up in his own bed, in his own country house near Bonnyrig, not far out of Edinburgh, with the book still in his hands. And feeling its wei ght there ... so maybe that's what had coloured his dreams. Vampires. The W amphyri. Not surprising, really: they'd coloured most of his dreams for sev eral years now.

Outside, dawn was on the brink; faint streamers of light, grey-green, fil tered through the narrow slits of his blinds; they tinted the atmosphere of h is bedroom with a faint watercolour haze, a wash of subdued submarine tints.

Half-reclining there, becoming aware, coming back to life, he felt a ting le start up in his scalp. His hair was standing up on end. So was his p.e.n.i.s, still throbbing from the dream. He was naked, electrically erect - and now aw are and intent.

He listened intently: to murmuring plumbing sounds as the central heating responded to its timer, to the first idiot twitterings of sleepy birds in the garden, to a world stretching itself in the strengthening dawn outside.

Rarely sleeping more than an hour or two at a stretch, dawn was Harry's favourite time - normally. It was always good to know that the night was saf ely past, a new day underway. But this time he felt that something was happe ning, and he gazed intently through the faint green haze, turning his eyes t o stare at the open bedroom door.

Drugged by sleep, his eyes saw everything with soft edges, fuzzy and in distinct. There was nothing sharp in the entire room. Except his inexplicab le intentness, which seemed odd when matched against his blurred vision.

Anyone who ever started awake after a good drunk would know how he fel t. You half-know where you are, you half-want to be somewhere special, you are half-afraid of not being where you should be; and even when you know where you are, you're still not quite sure you're there, or even that you are you. Part of the 'never again' syndrome.

Except that Harry had not been drinking - not that he could remember, a nyway.

The other thing that invariably affected him on those occasions when he woke up like this - the thing which had used to frighten him a great deal, but which he'd thought he was used to - was his paralysis. The fact that h e could not move. It was only the transition from sleep to waking, he knew that, but still it was horrible. He had to force gradual movement into his limbs, usually starting with a hand or a foot. He was paralysed now, with o nly his eyes to command of all his various parts. He made them stare throug h the open bedroom door into the shadows beyond.

Something was happening. Something had awakened him. Something had rob bed him of the satisfaction of spilling himself into Sandra and enjoying i t for once. Something was in the house . . .

That would account for his tingling scalp, his hair standing erect at t he back of his neck, his wilting hard-on. A perfume was in the air. Somethi ng moved in the shadows beyond the bedroom door: a movement sensed, not hea rd. Something came closer to the door, paused just out of sight in darkness.

Harry wanted to call out: 'Who's there?' but his paralysis wouldn't let him. Perhaps he gurgled a little. A shape emerged partly from the shadows. T hrough the submarine haze he saw a navel, the lower part of a belly with its dark bush of pubic hair, the curve of soft feminine hips and the tops of th ighs where they might show above dark stockings. She stood (whoever she was) just beyond the door, her flesh soft in the filtered light. As he watched s he transferred her weight from one unseen foot to the other, her thighs movi ng, her hip jutting. Above the belly, soft in the shadows, there would be br easts large and ripe. Sandra had large b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

It was Sandra, of course.

Harry's voice still refused to work, but he could now move the fingers of his left hand. Sandra must be able to see him, see how she was affecting him. His dream was about to become reality. The blood coursed in his veins and began to pound once more. In the back of his mind, faintly, he asked h imself questions. And answered them: Why had she come?

Obviously for s.e.x.

How had she got in?

He must have given her a key. He didn't remember doing so.

Why didn't she come forward more clearly into view?

Because she wanted to see him fully aroused first. Perhaps she had not w ished to wake him until she was in bed with him. Why had she waited so long to show him that she could be s.e.xually aggress ive? She'd taken the initiative before, certainly, but never to this extent.

Maybe because she sensed his uncertainty - feared that he might be havi ng second thoughts - or perhaps because she suspected he had never fully en joyed her.

Well, and maybe she was right.

Staring was causing his right eye to jump, both eyes to water. It was the poor light. Harry willed his left hand to move, stretched it out, pulled the cord that closed the window shutters - to shut out a little more of the fain t, greeny-grey light. That left the room in near-darkness -thin dim green str ipes on a black velvet background. And that was what she'd been waiting for.

Now she moved forward, olive-fleshed. She must be wearing stockings; a T-shirt, too, rolled up to show her navel. s.e.xy, dismembered by darkness, h er thighs, belly and navel floated towards him, hips moving languidly, gree n-striped. She got onto the bed, kneeling, her thighs opening, and inched f orward. The dark cleft was visible in her bush of pubic hair. She was so si lent. And so light. The bed did not sink in where she crept towards him. Ha rry wondered: how does she do that?

She began to lower herself onto him - slowly, so slowly - the dark cleft widening as her body settled to its target. He arched his back, straining up towards her . . . but why couldn't he feel her knees gripping his hips? Why w as she so weightless?

Then, suddenly and without warning, his flesh was crawling. l.u.s.t fled h im in a moment. For somehow -instinctively, intuitively - he knew that this was not Sandra. And worse, he knew that he couldn't rightly say what it wa s!

His left hand fumblingly found the light cord, pulled it.

Light flooded the room blindingly.

At the same time the cleft in her bush of pubic hair sprang open like a mechanical thing. White-gleaming, yawning jaws of salivating needle teeth set in bulging, obscenely glistening pink gums shot down from the gaping li ps to snap shut on him in a vice of shearing agony!

Harry screamed, rammed himself backwards in his bed, banged his head sav agely on the headboard. Galvanized, his hands stabbed out, striking murderou sly for a face, a throat - striking instinctively at features . . . which we ren't there!

Above the navel, nothing! And below the upper thighs, nothing!

She - it - was a lower abdomen, a disembodied v.a.g.i.n.a with cannibal tee th which were chomping on him! And his blood hot and red and spurting as t he thing feasted on his genitals and munched them up like so much slop. An d a crimson eye that snapped suddenly open, glaring at Harry from the orbi t which he had mistaken for a navel! 'And that's it, Harry?' Dr David Bettley, an E-Branch empath retired earl y for the sake of his shaky heart, gazed at his visitor from beneath half-low ered, bushy eyebrows.

'Isn't it enough?' the other answered, with some animation. 'Christ, it wa s enough for me! It scared the living daylights out of me. Yes, even out of me ! I mean, don't think I'm bragging but that's no easy thing to do. It's just t hat this d.a.m.n dream was so ... so real! We all have nightmares, but this one .

. .'He shook his head, gave an involuntary shudder.

'Yes, I can see how badly it affected you,' said Bettley, concernedly. 'But when I say "that's it", it isn't to make light of your experience. I'm simply asking, was there any more?'

'No,' Harry shook his head, 'for that's when I actually came awake. But i f you mean more reaction to it? You'd better believe there was! Look, I was w eak as a kitten. I'm sure I was in shock. I felt physically sick, almost thre w up. Also, I emptied my bowels - and I'm not ashamed to admit that I only ju st made it to the toilet! I don't mean to be crude, but that dream literally scared the s.h.i.t out of me!' He paused, slumped back in his chair and lost a l ittle of his animation. He looked tired, Bettley thought.

But eventually he struggled upright again and continued. 'Afterwards ...

I prowled the house with all the lights blazing, with a meat cleaver in my hand. I searched for the thing everywhere. For an hour, two, until full dayl ight. And most of that time I was shaking like a leaf. It was only when I'd stopped shaking that I finally convinced myself it was a dream.' He suddenly laughed, but his laughter was shaky even now. 'Hey! - I nearly called the p olice. Can you picture that? I mean, you're a psychiatrist, but how do you t hink they'd have taken my story, eh? Maybe I'd have been in to see you a day or two earlier!'

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 fi ve 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 m an 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 Kyl e, whose job with E-Branch had been in large part sedentary. But it had matte red to Harry. After that business at the Chateau Bronnitsy - his metempsychos is - 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 shoo k his head and blinked again.

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

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

Harry raised an eyebrow.

'About your feelings towards Sandra. You've mentioned a certain ambivalen ce, a lack of desire, even a slackening of potency. It could be that you're t aking 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 ambiv alent 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. Sometim es it's good to be just normal, ordinary. Let's face it, most people would co nsider 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 s.p.a.ced as to seem deliberately designed or affe cted, were plentiful in Harry's russet-brown, naturally wavy hair. It would n't be too many years before the grey overtook the brown; even now it loane d 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 a ll. 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 ther e, 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 s.p.a.ceship, or a time-machine?

Harry opened his eyes and caught Bettley staring at him. He said nothin g, 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 t aken him on. And again Harry wondered: is he still working for them? Not th at it would matter a great deal, for Bettley was easy to talk to. It was ju st 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 neede d 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 t he things he'd done.

Bettley forced himself back to the job in hand. 'So I'm half-wrong,' he s aid. 'You would like your talents back, to be a "freak" again - your words, H arry. But what will you do with those talents if they do return to you? How w ill 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 c ould 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 y oung, just a baby, when she died. But I got to know her . . . later. And I mi ss her. A boy's best friend is his mum, you know? And . . . well, I have a lo t of friends down there.'

'In the ground?'

'Yes. h.e.l.l, 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 thing s had gone in the world of the living. Some of them worried a lot, about pe ople they'd left behind. I was able to rea.s.sure them. But most were merely lonely. Merely! But I knew what it was like for them. I could feel it. It w as h.e.l.l to be that lonely. They needed me; I was somebody to them; and I su ppose 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 p arts 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 looke d at Bettley more piercingly. 'Explain.'

'But isn't it obvious? A disembodied female Thing - a dead thing, a vamp ire 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 ou t 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 y our past, Harry: it's all the things you've lost until you're afraid of losi ng 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 o wn body! And finally you've lost your talents. No more Mobius 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 h is brow.

'Go on,' Bettley prompted him.

'I have to start some way back,' Harry continued, 'when I was a kid at H arden Modern Boys. That's a school. I was a Necroscope even then, but it was n't something I much liked. It used to make me dizzy, sick even. I mean it c ame 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 s hort hairs began to rise at the back of his neck. This was going to be import ant. He glanced down at a b.u.t.ton on his side of the desk: it was still red, t he tape was still running. 'What sort of things?' he asked, hiding his eagern ess.

'I was an infant when my stepfather killed my mother,' the other answere d. '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 reconstr ucted it later from overheard conversations because Shukshin's account of th e "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 fing er: a cat's-eye set in a thick gold band. It came off when he drowned her an d sank to the bottom of the river, and fifteen years later I knew where to g o back and dive for it.'

Bettley felt a tingling in his spine. 'But you were a Necroscope - the Nec roscope - and read it out of your dead mother's mind. Surely?'

Harry shook his head. 'No, because it was a dream I had from a time lo ng before I first consciously talked to the dead. And in it I "remembered"

something I couldn't possibly remember. It was a talent I'd had without e ven recognizing it. You know my mother was a psychic medium, and her mothe r, too? Maybe it was something that came down from them. But as my greater talent - as a Necroscope - developed, so this other thing was pushed into the background, got lost.'

'And you think all of this has something to do with this new dream of yo urs? In what way?'

Harry's shrug was lighter, no longer defeatist. 'You know how when som eone goes blind he seems to develop a sixth sense? And people handicapped from birth, how they seem to make up for their deficiencies in other ways?

'Of course,' the doctor answered. 'Some of the greatest musicians the world 's ever seen have been deaf or blind. But what . . .?' And then he snapped his fingers. 'I see! So you think that the loss of your other talents has caused th is . . . this atrophied one to start growing again, is that it?'

'Maybe,' Harry nodded, 'maybe. Except I'm not just seeing things from t he past any more but from the future. My future. But vaguely, unformed exce pt as nightmares.'

It was Bettley's turn to frown. 'A precog, is that what you think you're becoming? But what has this to do with vampires, Harry?'

'It was my dream,' the other answered. 'Something I'd forgotten, or hadn'

t wanted to remember, until you brought it back to me. But now I remember it clearly. I can see it clearly.'

'Go on.'

'It's just a little thing,' Harry shrugged again, perhaps defensively.

'But best if we have it out in the open, right?' Bettley spoke quietly, cl earing the way for Harry without openly urging him on.

'Perhaps.' And in a sudden rush of words: 'I saw red threads! The scarlet l ife-threads of vampires!'

'In your dream?' Bettley shivered as gooseflesh crept on his back and fo rearms. 'Where in your dream?'

'In the green stripes where the light came through the blinds,' Harry an swered. 'The stripes on her belly and thighs, in the moment before that h.e.l.l ish thing fastened on me. They were green-tinted, almost submarine, but as m y blood began to spurt they turned red. Red stripes streaming off her body i nto the dim past, and also into the future. Writhing red threads among the b lue life-threads of humanity. Vampires!'