That’s what the orphanage director had said the day they went to pick up their new son, and the words had always stuck in David’s memory: ‘Healthy in mind, as well as in body.’
Something wrong with Johnny’s mind? Something a little sick? Or a lot sick? For that was the nature of the aura which David sometimes felt washing out from the boy: a sick one, and clammy as an old man on his deathbed. Johnny felt sick as death. But not his death.
And this morning, sure enough, the letter was there. David tore it open and read it, and for a little while the words made no sense. Budgerigars in the kids’ rooms, and Johnny stealing, killing and collecting them? A collection of dead things: mice, beetles, the budgies, even a kitten?
A dead kitten under his bed, crawling with maggots, and Johnny twisting its legs until they came off in his hands? That was how the orphanage people had found out about it, when the other kids came screaming.
But a kitten?
Moggit . . .?
Screaming?
And David could hear the horrified screams of those kids from here. Except it wasn’t those kids but one of his own – no, his own – Carol, from the bottom of the garden!
What . . .?
And Alice’s sleepy, mumbling voice from upstairs, calling down, ‘Where’s the coffee? The kids are up early.’
And another scream from the garden, cut off gurglingly at its zenith.
David had ever been the one to leap to conclusions, often incorrectly. He did so now, and this time was right.
Down the garden path with his dressing-gown flapping, yelling for Carol, hoarsely, like crazy. But no answer. And a small blurred figure inside the polythene dome, kneeling at the side of the pool. David burst in; it was Johnny kneeling there; he looked as if he were trying to drag Carol out of the water. And she was floating there, face-down, arms limply outstretched, crucified on the blue, gently lapping water.
Johnny had been playing in the fields; he’d heard Carol’s screams and seen a man – dirty, bearded, dressed in rags – climbing the wall out of the garden. The man ran away across the fields and Johnny went to see what he’d been doing. Carol was in the pool and he’d tried to drag her out.
He told the story to David, to Alice, the police, anyone who wanted to hear it. And most of them believed him; even David half-believed him, though he didn’t want him near any more. And Alice probably believed him, though that would be hard to say for she wasn’t much good for anything from that time forward.
The police found a camp site in the ruins of the old farm and brought up a lot of rubbish from the well. Someone, person or persons, must have been living rough there, stealing from gardens and properties (David’s pigeons) in order to eat. It could be gypsies (the hedgehog), or maybe a tramp. Hard to say. Chances were they’d get him or them eventually.
But they never did get anyone.
And Johnny went back to the orphanage . . .
Harry slept on and for a little while longer experienced Johnny Pound’s dreams. Of course, he saw Pound’s past only from the necromancer’s own point of view, which if anything was worse than the whole picture and more than sufficient to guarantee he had the right man. But eventually Pound’s excesses became too much – his dreaming memories of his own evil deeds a lurid litany to his inhumanity – by which time Harry’s hatred of him had grown into a rage.
Johnny Found had lived all his young life a monster and murderer and so far had got away with it, but until recently his step-sister Carol had remained his single human victim. Between times he’d made do and played his unthinkable ‘games’ with creatures dead of causes other than murder.
But as men and monsters alike mature, so their tastes also mature, and Johnny was no exception. Except . . . what grotesque form does maturity take in something rotten from the start?
Once, for entirely unthinkable reasons which even Harry Keogh couldn’t bear to contemplate, Found had taken a job in a morgue; only to be fired when his boss became suspicious. It was his dream about another job he’d had, however, this time in a slaughterhouse, which did the trick and, like the last straw, broke the Necro-scope’s back.