The Last Aerie (80 page)

“Nathan Keogh, yes. I’m the son of Harry Keogh, and your friends in E-Branch have asked me to help you. They couldn’t reach you but I can. And I’m the only one who can. That’s why you have to listen to me.”

Thickening, the poltergeist mist had taken on a lot more of weird luminosity; sufficient now to light the entire morgue with an eerie blue foxfire. And the morgue really
was
a morgue. Its contents appeared real now; not wavering, insubstantial and half opaque, but solid as life. John Scofield’s hatred made it real, as his enhanced telekinetic powers prepared the killing ground for a new assault upon his dead enemy.

NATHAN KEOOOOGH … His deadspeak voice breathed again—breathed the mist, which swirled about the room and filled its corners, bringing them to glowing life. And: NO, YOU WOULD TRY TO TRICK ME, the voice continued. IF YOU ARE KEOGH, YOU WOULD DEPRIVE ME OF MY PREY. AND IF YOU ARE
NOT
KEOGH, THEN YOU ARE PREN-TISSSS! TOD PRENTISS, YESSSS, AND YOU ARE AFRAID OF DYING … AGAIN! NOW LET ME THINK. HOW HAVE I KILLED YOU? IN HOW MANY WAYS?

“I’m Keogh,” Nathan insisted. “Nathan Keogh. How else am I talking to you, if not in deadspeak?
Who
else but a Necroscope could do it?”

THE DEAD CAN DO IT. ANY ONE OF THEM CAN. BUT YOU KNOW THAT, DON’T YOU, PRENTISS? FOR YOU
ARE
DEAD, AND WOULD REMAIN DEAD—EXCEPT I DRIVE YOU BACK INTO A SEMBLANCE OF LIFE SO THAT I MAY KILL YOU YET AGAIN. AS INDEED I
INTEND
TO KILL YOU YET AGAIN!

Feeling the dreadful intensity of Scofield’s obsession—his paranoia, which would not be denied by anything as simple as the truth—Nathan opened his deadspeak channels wider yet. Now he must enlist the aid of the Great Majority, for his was only one voice and theirs were many. If he could only persuade them to talk to him, perhaps he could convince Scofield of his truth. His thoughts were deadspeak, of course, and the madman had heard them.

OH, CLEVER, SO CLEVER! BUT YOU WERE CLEVER IN LIFE, TOO, ELSE YOU WOULD NEVER HAVE LASTED SO LONG. BUT TELL ME THIS: IF YOU ARE IN “TRUTH” THE NECROSCOPE, THEN WHY DON’T THE DEAD TALK BACK TO YOU? OR ARE THEY SAVING THAT FOR LATER—THEIR TRUMP CARD—WHEN EVERYTHING ELSE FAILS? THE ONLY THING THAT PUZZLES ME IS WHY THEY SHOULD CONCERN THEMSELVES WITH YOU AT ALL!

“And what about you?” Nathan found courage to answer. “Don’t you care about the Great Majority?” (His words went out to all the dead now.) “Are you so unfeeling of them? Don’t you know how you’re harming them, how much damage you can do? And not only to the dead but to the living? You mentioned a trump card. But would you play the ‘last trump’, John?” (Nathan had watched an E-Branch Duty Officer playing patience one night; he knew what cards were, and he’d learned the meaning of “the last trump” the first time he spoke to Keenan Gormley, for deadspeak often conveys more than is actually said.

WHAT ARE YOU SAYING? And again there was other than madness in the great voice. MY ARGUMENT IS WITH YOU, TOD PRENTISS. IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE TEEMING DEAD—UNLESS THEY WOULD DENY ME MY REVENGE. AND CERTAINLY IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE LIVING. THE LAST TRUMP? TO CALL UP THE DEAD? BUT SURELY THAT’S YOUR PROVINCE, ‘NECROSCOPE’! The voice was caustic, full of sarcasm. “And yours.” Nathan was growing desperate, and still the dead ignored him. Or if not that—if they were beginning to listen to him now—listening was all they were doing. “It’s your province, too. For you’re the one who calls up Tod Prentiss out of death, to make him pay for what he did to you and yours. Well, and perhaps you have the right, but why must all of the dead suffer? And what of the living?”

TRICKERY!
Scofield bellowed. WORD GAMES! MIND GAMES! BUT I WON’T PLAY THEM WITH YOU. YOU ARE GOING TO DIE—AGAIN AND AGAIN AND
AGAIN,
TOD PRENTISSSS!

Word games …

Well, in a sense Scofield was right: it was a word game of sorts, and Nathan was good at them. The Mage of Runemanse himself had admitted as much. But this time … so much depended on the game that Nathan must use every word to maximum effect. And so he fell silent, to consider his next move.

The air in the morgue was freezing now, and it throbbed almost audibly with a barely contained power that galvanized Nathan’s hair into electrical life and raised goose-flesh on his arms and back. It was at least five and a half hours to midnight, and for all of that time the power would be building. Surely it couldn’t be contained. Not in one room. Not by one man.

Meanwhile, he had inched his way slowly to the doors and now tried them. Useless; there was no give in them; they might as well be welded shut. And tendrils of blue-glowing mist were seeking him out, creeping across the floor and weaving through the bitterly cold air to where his breath plumed frosty white. While starting up again in his head:

HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I KILLED YOU, TOD PRENTISS? NOT ENOUGH, NOT NEARLY ENOUGH. AND IN HOW MANY WAYS? I HAVE CUT YOUR THROAT WITH A RAZOR. BUT … HAVE I BURNED YOU? NO. I’VE DRIVEN NAILS INTO YOUR EYES, YOUR BRAIN. BUT HAVE I CRUSHED YOUR SKULL WITH MY TELEKINESIS, OH SO SLOWLY, UNTIL BRAIN FLUIDS TRICKLE FROM YOUR EARS LIKE THE YOLKS OF EGGS? NO. I’VE GELDED YOU WITH A WHITE HOT POKER, DRIVING IT INTO THE STEAMING RAW HOLE OF WHAT WAS YOUR SEX. BUT HAVE I DROWNED YOU IN BLOOD…?

… NOT YET!

Putting his shoulder to the doors and leaning his weight on them—like shoving at the face of a granite cliff, without moving it the smallest fraction of an inch—Nathan felt the mist damp around his ankles; damp and mobile … and yet glutinous, too.

Gluey…

He looked down—

—And saw that the floor was red! Six inches deep in red! And Scofield’s words came back to him: “But have I drowned you in blood? Not yet!”

Nathan sucked in air in a huge gasp, held it, thought for a moment that his heart had stopped, that at the very least he was going to topple over, faint—and knew that that was the last thing he could do. He daren’t faint! For he was standing in blood up to his ankles, and felt it oozing, soaking through his trousers, socks, shoes. For a moment he didn’t believe it, but he could see it, feel it, smell it. Blood!

On Starside, in Turgosheim, the Wamphyri had a saying: the blood is the life. But here it was or could be the death. Dead blood, like the terrible
juice
of a thousand slaughterhouses, conjured by the telekinetic mind of a dead man to slap in sluggish, scarlet wavelets at Nathan’s ankles … No, at his calves! For the lake of blood was getting deeper by the second.

Galvanized, gasping for air, and barely managing to rein back on his horror, Nathan sloshed through this crimson stuff of nightmares—this stuff of the Nightmare Zone—to make for one of the surgical trolleys standing draped in its white rubber sheet. If it was real he would climb onto it, lift himself out of the blood. And if it wasn’t real… then neither was the blood.

But as he got there, so the rubber sheet bulked out, took on shape: the outline of a human body! And suddenly sitting up—jerking erect like a puppet on a string, so that the sheet slipped to one side—the corpse turned its pale, white, silently screaming face to look at Nathan! Its throat was slashed ear to ear, and its wrists sliced through, and the dead blood was pouring from the wounds in a flood!

“No!”
Nathan shouted, shoving spastically at the trolley and sending it rolling sluggishly through the deep red flood, its gruesome burden lolling, then toppling into a lake of its own making. And all a fantasy, a nightmare conceived by John Scofield where his dead mind thought its telekinetic thoughts in the heart of the Nightmare Zone. But a fantasy that could kill, stop a man’s heart, freeze the very blood in his veins—or cause him to drown in it!

A fantasy that was rapidly expanding.

The other trolley was similarly occupied with a silently screaming, blood-gushing corpse, and the aluminium caskets had floated free of their refrigerated bank, to drift like metal boats on a crimson lake. And from within them a frenzied hammering of corpse hands on vibrating panels, the lids thrown violently open, corpses trying to stand up, capsizing their grotesque vessels and tipping themselves into the ghastly flood.

The blood was up to Nathan’s thighs. He waded to the filing cabinets and climbed them, and sat in the corner with his back to the walls, watching the staggering corpses with their slit throats and wrists where they gradually submerged in the ever-deepening tide. And without even realizing it, suddenly the Necroscope found himself rocking to and fro and moaning to himself. The human mind can only take so much …

Nathan
… It was Sir Keenan Gormley’s horrified dead-speak voice.
Nathan, this isn’t the way to go!

Another dead man
, Nathan thought, which was deadspeak, of course.
A plague of dead men. Even Starside, Turgosheim, was better than this.

And suddenly Gormley was frantic in his mind.
Nathan … are you giving in? But you mustn’t! Your father never gave in. He was a fighter to the end.

Nathan wanted to laugh, cry, shout his frustration: symptoms of hysteria, which finally he recognized. Somehow he controlled himself, said:
Harry Keogh
could afford to fight. His army fought for him. The dead were his friends, his troops. I have nothing, only Harry’s blood. As for his “talent”: what good is that if the Great Majority won’t let me use it?

But they’ve been watching, listening,
Gormley told him.
You opened yourself up to them, and they entered. They heard your argument with John
Scofield, your plea on their behalf, and on behalf of the living. They’ve felt the warmth of your deadspeak thoughts and know that you’re on their side, Nathan. And now they’re ready to help you. Indeed, they’ve been helping you, or trying their hardest.

Nathan felt a new strength, new hope. Gormley had a persuasive personality
. The dead are helping me? How? In what way?

Scofield’s wife and son are locked in their own terror, as they’ve been since Tod Prentiss murdered them. But now, as the Great Majority make every effort to comfort them, they are coming out of it. They were in trauma, Nathan, beyond our reach—and perhaps more importantly, beyond John Scofield’s reach! They should be able to provide the element of control which is all he’s lacking. Together with his family, Scofield will be whole again.

NOOOOO!!!
Scofield was back again, more furious than ever. TRICKERY! YOU TORTURED THEM IN LIFE, AND NOW YOU WOULD TORTURE THEM IN DEATH. AH, YOU CAN FOOL THE TEEMING DEAD, TOD PRENTISS, BUT YOU CAN NEVER FOOL ME! NOW DROWN, BASTARD, IN THE BLOOD OF THE DEAD!

And suddenly it was raining red!

Nathan cast a disbelieving, horrified glance at the low ceiling just overhead, watched crimson cracks leaking first a splash, a trickle, then streams of blood. The cracks joined up to form a spiderweb whose scarlet threads zig-zagged rapidly, wildly across the broad plaster expanse; threatening blotches and blisters formed as the ceiling bulged under the weight of blood; the plaster tore open with a soggy, ripping sound like wet, rotten meat, letting down its load into the morgue. And washed from his perch, Nathan went under.

Then …

The doors burst open! The twin-door leading to the police station, and a moment later the door to the basement of the hospital. But it was as if they were forced open, from within. And in fact they had been, by the sheer weight of blood! Or by the weight of the
Mind
that had created the illusion.

In the corridor, Trask and Garvey were knocked off their feet, hurled back along the cell-lined corridor clinging to a bench. Likewise in the hospital: Geoff Smart’s legs seemed cut out from under him as he was sent flying, slapped down, drenched in blood.

It happened … and it was over! As quickly as that.

And nothing had changed, except the time.

Out in the corridor, Ben Trask and Paul Garvey issued simultaneous cries of astonishment. They dropped their bench battering-ram, which narrowly missed Trask’s feet, causing him to exclaim and jump back a little. Then, off balance, he sat down abruptly on the softly gleaming tiles—but not in a pool of blood.

Garvey leaned back weakly against the wall; he mopped his brow with a trembling hand, felt the impaired flesh of his face jerking uncontrollably. In the doorway to the hospital basement, Geoff Smart tottered like an infant; sick and completely disorientated, he bumped left and right against the uprights of the wide door frame. But there was no blood anywhere. Not a drop to be seen.

Finally the three espers pulled themselves together, and Trask and Smart entered the morgue. Nathan was seated in a corner ashen-faced, gasping for air and hugging his knees. And the way he turned his head to stare all about, it was obvious that his disorientation was the worst of all…

In his time, Ben Trask had seen and been through a lot. Also, he was the human lie-detector and knew that what he was looking at now was the plain truth. First to recover himself fully, he went straight to Nathan. “Son? Are you OK?”

Nathan could breathe easy again, and as Trask helped him to his feet he asked, “What … what happened?” He was shivering and damp; not with blood, but his own cold sweat.

“Out there?” Trask looked over his shoulder at the silhouetted door space. The glowing blue mist had disappeared along with the blood. “We’ve been trying like hell to get in. That’s about all that’s happened. And in here?”

Nathan felt dehydrated. He knew Trask had brought coffee, sugar and milk with him in the car; all the makings. And still shivering, he said: “I’ll tell you all about it… but first I need a drink.”

Smart came to help Trask with Nathan. “I was with you right at the end,” he said. “God, I don’t know what it was about, but it must have been the worst nightmare anyone ever suffered!”

Paul Garvey waited out in the corridor; not cowardice, just good sense. It wouldn’t be clever for all four of them to be in the morgue together. But as the others came out, he said: “I was with you, too. Or I would have been—if they had let me.”

“They?” Trask looked at him.