Necroscope: Harry and the Pirates: and Other Tales from the Lost Years (25 page)

“And now that really is it, I’ve said my lot. Except—

“—Maybe now you’ll understand what so concerned me after I saw how you felt drawn back to that old graveyard. For that’s where Billy Browen is to this day, Harry, and who’s to say what cerecloths his old bones are wearing now, eh . . . ?”

Who indeed?
thought the Necroscope.

And while the urgency within persisted, while yet he felt the need to return at once to the cemetery, Erik’s final words, spoken in genuine concern, gave Harry sufficient pause that his movements were less than hurried when he got down from the harbour wall, stretched his legs to revitalise them, then leaned on the wall and stared out over the water. For some few minutes he stood there thinking things through, considering his position.

Events were more and more beginning to make sense, not all of it to his liking. If indeed there was danger in Hartlepool’s old cemetery, surely the Great Majority would have known of it? And if they knew of it why hadn’t they warned him? For they had had plenty of opportunity. Those of them lying at some distance from the graveyard might be innocent of knowledge, but the teeming dead who actually inhabited—no, bad word; “dwelled” then? No, even worse, for it implied life—who were
ensconced
there, they would certainly have known of any problem.

And what of that wall of deadspeak babble and interference which they had thrown up between the Necroscope and Erik Haroldson and the old graveyard itself? If they didn’t want Harry and the Viking’s conversation to be overheard, why not simply bring the danger—whatever it might prove to be—to Harry’s attention, enabling him to raise his own shields and so preserve his privacy? Or was there perhaps something in that graveyard which they feared desperately, even more than they loved Harry Keogh? Well, possibly. But did that mean that he should fear it, too?

Oh yes, very definitely!

For the teeming dead,
being
dead and quite beyond harm—
apparently
—should have little or no reason to fear anything. Yet the Necroscope knew of things that even the Great Majority dreaded . . . no less than he himself: things he should avoid at all cost! Except
being
the Necroscope, he was the sworn guardian of the dead.

For which reason—

—He moved from the sea wall and sought cover, and hidden however briefly from human eyes conjured metaphysical maths and took the Möbius route back to the ancient graveyard. But now as he moved between the old plots, Harry was more than ever alert, taking in all that was available to his eyes, ears, and nostrils of the scenery, silence, and lurking imminence of the place. And its imminence was such that he could almost feel its weight—

—Until he realised that this weight he felt was actually a gradually
building hum, a throb, the burgeoning din of energies that seemed to be issuing from . . .
from the Necroscope himself
! Harry was the psychic “dynamo,” the human mechanism that was converting energy into the vibrant current that was emanating from him! But who or what was tapping into Harry’s unique mind, feeding it alien energy and using it as an amplifier? To what weird receiver was this involuntary signal being transmitted, and what information was it carrying? A complete mystery: the Necroscope might hazard a reasonable guess in answer to at least one of these questions, the first of them, but he had no definite answer to any of them—not yet.

Flinching from a blinding migraine that came stabbing out of nowhere to parallel Harry’s new concept and reduce his sensitivity to his surroundings, he approached Billy Browen’s grave. But then, as he stumbled against a tombstone that marked one of several previously noted, partly sunken plots, the groping hand with which he steadied himself revealed a badly weathered skull and crossbones design in crumbling bas-relief. The names, dates, and epitaphs, long since faded and lichened over, were unreadable, but the engraving itself told its own story, however inarticulate.

Employed almost universally in times immemorial as death’s principal indicant, this macabre sigil was also that of pirates and their trade. And now, as Harry looked more attentively from headstone to ivied headstone, he saw that the leaning, occasionally broken markers over
all
of these oddly concave graves bore the selfsame grisly motif. What was more, this handful of partially collapsed plots had been arranged about Billy Browen’s in something of an irregular semicircle—almost as if to enclose it against the cemetery’s rear wall. . . .

This meant something, Harry was sure. If not for the damnable buzzing and throbbing in his head, and the lights flashing before his eyes, he believed he might even be able to sense the revenants of the old pirates who were buried here holding their deadspeak breath! But while they appeared unwilling to speak to him, there remained at least one other “old pirate” who was:

Harry? Is it you?
came the enquiry in a “voice” previously presumed to be deadspeak—except now Harry saw that it wasn’t deadspeak but a perfect imitation, telepathy of a sort—and in no way a communication from a dead creature but from someone or thing very much alive, which yet issued from the grave to which he now felt irresistibly drawn. And:

Ah, but of course!
the voice went on, boldly now and even mockingly, showing never a trace of its previous piratical parlance.
Of course it is the Necroscope, Harry Keogh himself! Who else could it be? Who else with a mind powerful enough to reach out to the stars and perhaps into other places? Who so dark and yet so innocent, fallible, that he can err, and grievously? Who of such enormous, misplaced conceit, that having confronted and defeated even the worst of men and monsters, he now believes he is invincible? A conceit which discovers nothing to fear in the allure of one who fell from the sky and was crippled.
I am that one . . . !
Hurt, I gradually healed myself, conserving my energies down all the decades and even the centuries until the coming of a saviour—
your
coming, Harry!

“Crippled? Healed yourself?” the Necroscope mumbled, clutching at his temples, going to his knees in the crumbly soil of Billy and something else’s grave. And even knowing the danger now, still he felt drawn like an iron filing to a magnet, fascinated by something in the ground, hypnotised, almost paralysed by a power which—inasmuch as it could use him like this, in a manner and for a purpose as yet undisclosed—must be at least the equal of his own.

Yes I preserved myself,
the sky-thing continued,
conserved my energies, healed myself with the lives and discarded
materia
of an alien species—your species, Harry—ever hoping against hope that a mind such as yours would one day stray within range of my allure. But when finally that time dawned I was still too weak to take advantage, too afraid of your strength to approach you. Having usurped the mind of Billy Browen, I heard you speak to others who were buried here; and while I waited, I strove to learn the language of my host, to speak with his voice and mannerisms. Not difficult: his mind was mine from which to draw all such knowledge! But while all of this was several years ago, the waiting was only over when finally I knew that I could best
you . . . which was today, when you returned to me and I saw that you could not resist my allure.

On his knees beside the blank marble marker, reeling like a drunkard from the pain in his head, the Necroscope was barely able to control his thoughts when he mouthed: “But who . . .
what
are you?”

A survivor!
came the answer.
I survived a war out there in the stars. When my vessel was destroyed and I fell to earth, or rather into an ocean, the water sapped what little strength remained in me; your sun’s rays revived me, returned something of my vitality, but not enough. The host creatures who succored me—on whom I relied for sustenance, the energies of their minds and bodies—had died with my ship; but I discovered an alternative subsistence in the men who rescued me from the sea . . . as I believe “Billy Browen” has already informed you. Oh, indeed!

Reeling to alien laughter, Harry said, “First Zhadia, then Black Jake and the crew of . . . of the
Sea Witch . . .
and finally Billy. No, finally
me
!’ He rocked this way and that, clutching his skull as the hammering in his brain grew unbearably louder. “And the fact is I’ve never even met . . . never met or spoken to . . . to the
real
Billy! But what . . . what is it you’re doing . . . doing to me? And why . . . why are you doing it?”

As the Necroscope fought to stay upright where he kneeled, suddenly he felt the earth shift beneath him: just a tremor, or a groping in the darkness of the dirt, but it filled him with a nameless dread. He knew he should up and run, but the magnetism of the thing in Billy Browen’s grave held him in place, and his murderous migraine continued to weaken him. It was all he could do to stay vertical against the alien attraction, while beneath his knees the soil was beginning to move like quicksand.

Down there the thing from the stars wormed laboriously for the surface, loosening dirt and pushing it aside as it strained upwards for the light. Its “voice” was also strained as it answered Harry’s question:

Your mind has the power which mine has lost. Now that you are drawn to
me I can inspire your mind to greater efforts yet: such efforts will kill you, of course . . . even now the pressure builds within your brain, and you will die to give me life. You must suffer a little while longer; but only a little while. For even now the signal our combined minds are sending to the stars is being answered . . . and I sense others of my kind on their way to rescue me.

Harry gasped, choked in his agony, and tried to do what he should have done at the first sign of trouble: conjure a Möbius door right there alongside him on the grave, and topple himself through it. But the metaphysical maths resisted him; instead of esoteric equations, fabulous formulae, the screen of the Necroscope’s mind issued an invisible beam not only into the sky but into
all
space! It travelled, not at the speed of light but the speed of thought; in fact it did not “travel” at all but simply “became” instantaneously! And yes, certain others were speeding to its source, to planet Earth, to this graveyard and the alien star-being that was now emerging from Billy Browen’s plot.

A tumult of other voices—but true deadspeak voices now, from myriad cemetery plots silent until now—sprang into sudden, urgent existence in the Necroscope’s psychic perception:

Go now, Harry, leave! Now that we know what this thing is, and that it will soon depart, save yourself! Use your powers to put miles, leagues, the span of a world between, where the creature’s will, its weird allure, can no longer reach you!

With what small part of his consciousness remained to him, Harry answered in their own mode:
And now you speak to me, when it’s too . . . too late. What was I, then? Some kind of scapegoat or sacrifice? My Möbius numbers are gone, obscured in the energies that this thing is channelling through me! I can’t . . . can’t move!

The graveyard was empty of all living souls save the Necroscope himself . . . no possibility of help from any human hand or agency, not of the corporeal variety. Beside Harry the soil was bulging; something mobile, dull, the colour of patinated bronze, was pushing aside the earth beneath the marble slab, causing it to tilt. The once-golden sky-thing, almost drained of energy no less than Harry—its allure beginning to wane, but yet strong enough to hold him in place, to fascinate him as it had fascinated
Zhadia and the crew of the
Sea Witch
—was exhuming itself into the daylight!

The edge of a sentient, liquid bronze blanket curled over, touched Harry’s arm, froze for a split second . . . then quivered and stuck like glue! It immediately assumed a glowing lustre, a saffron sheen that moved rapidly from the point of contact down into the thing’s bulk where it was still buried in the dirt.

The Necroscope cried out, lifted a shaking hand, and like the proverbial drowning man who clutches at straws, grasped the exposed rim of the marble slab and exerted leverage. It was his last, desperate attempt to push back from the lure of the star-thing.

The partly tilted marker toppled onto its back, revealing its underside. And through eyes that could barely see by reason of the migraine that was tormenting him, finally Harry was able to read the inscription—a badly engraved couplet, its crudely erratic, antique lettering all clogged with dirt—which until now had lain hidden, sight unseen:

Here lie the remains of Billy Browen—

Pray God this stone helps keep him down!

Harry’s arm to the shoulder felt cold . . . and yet it was a very terrible cold that was beginning to burn. In parallel, the edge of liquid metal where it seemed to have fused with his arm had become a siphon, gleaming an even brighter golden hue as it grew stronger, leeching on the Necroscope’s physical as opposed to his mental energies.

Again Harry cried out, not in protest at the numbing sensation in his arm and shoulder—though that was a cold-burning pain in itself—but by reason of the bomb bursts of fire that were melting his mind, the agonising brilliance of the migraine that was killing him.

And his cries were answered.

Dust spiralled up from burial plots all around, especially from a grave some small distance beyond the four marked with skull
and crossbones symbols, whose headstones stood like sentinels in a roughly delineated semicircle around the place where Harry kneeled in dirt and leaf-mould. It was the dust of forgotten men—of men long dead! The dust of bones fretted by grave worms and acidic soil, ground down by time and set aside by the action of gravediggers at their grim duties. The dust of flesh perished beyond corruption, withered, desiccated, and sifted to the surface on cold, careless shovels. This whirling dust devil—suddenly sentient and full of purpose—rushed in upon Harry as if to smother him!

But the Necroscope wasn’t its target.

The dirt in Billy Browen’s grave erupted as the thing from the stars finally emerged in full. Its form seemed lightweight, almost as if it had no weight at all, as it rose above the plot and wafted into the air; and yet it took Harry with it, lifting him to his feet as his eyes grew dull and began to glaze over—