As if someone had touched him with naked electric wires, Harry jerked where he stood beside her, jerked and shuddered as he relived, with her, the girl’s last moments. Her last living, breathing moments, but not the last things she had known. For in certain mercifully rare circumstances – and at the command of certain monstrous men – even dead flesh can be made to feel again.
In a nightmarishly subliminal sequence, a series of flickering, kaleidoscopic, vividly ghastly pictures flashed on the screen of the Necroscope’s metaphysical mind and then were gone. But after-images remained, and Harry knew that these wouldn’t go away so easily; indeed, that they would probably remain for a long time. He knew it as surely as he now knew what he was dealing with, because he’d dealt with such a thing before.
That one’s name had been . . . Dragosani!
This one, this poor girl’s murderer, had been like that -like Dragosani, a necromancer – but in one especially hideous respect he’d been still worse than that. For not even Dragosani had raped his corpse victims!
But it’s over now, he told the girl. He can’t come back. You’re safe now.
He felt the shuddering of her thoughts receding, replaced by the natural curiosity of her incorporeal mind. She wanted to know him, but for the moment felt afraid to know anything. She wanted, too, to know her condition, except that was probably the most frightening thing of all. But in her own small way she was brave, and she had to know for sure.
Am I. . . (her deadspeak voice was no longer a shriek but a shivery tremor) am I really . . .?
Yes, you are, Harry nodded, and knew that she’d sense the movement even as all the teeming dead sensed his every mood and motion. But… (he stumbled), I mean . . . it could be worse!
He’d been through all of this before, too often, and it never got any easier. How do you convince someone recently dead that it could be worse? ‘Your body will rot and worms will devour it, but your mind will go on. Oh, you won’t see anything – it will always be dark, and you’ll never touch or taste or smell anything again – but it could be worse. Your parents and loved ones will cry over your grave and plant flowers there, seeking to visualize in their blooms something of your face and form; but you won’t know they’re there or be able to speak to them and say, “Here I am!” You won’t be able to reassure them that “It could be worse.”‘
This was Harry’s expression of grief, meant to be private, but his thoughts were deadspeak. She heard and felt them and knew him for a friend. And: You’re the Necroscope, she said then. They tried to tell me about you but I was afraid and wouldn’t listen. When they spoke to me I turned away. I didn’t want to … to talk to dead people.
Harry was crying. Great tears blurred his vision, rolled down his pale, slightly hollow cheeks, splashed hot where they fell on his hand on her brow. He hadn’t wanted to cry, didn’t know he could, but there was that in him which worked on his feelings and amplified them, lifting them above the emotions of ordinary men. Safe – so long as it worked on an emotion such as this one, which was grief and entirely human.
Darcy Clarke had come forward; he touched the Necroscope’s arm. ‘Harry?’
Harry shook him off, and his voice was choked but harsh too as he rasped: ‘Leave us alone! I want to talk to her in private.’
Clarke backed off, his Adam’s apple bobbing. It was the look on Harry’s face, which brought tears to his eyes, too. ‘Of course,’ he said. He turned and left the room, and closed the door after him.
Harry took a metal-framed chair from beside the stacked shelving and sat by the dead girl. He very carefully cradled her head in his arms.
I… I can feel that, she said, wonderingly.
‘Then you can feel, too, that I’m not like him,’ Harry answered out loud. He preferred simply to talk to the dead, for that way it came more naturally to him.