And so, as the necromancer straightened up his truck off the roundabout and back on to the Al, Harry emerged from the eternal darkness of the Möbius Continuum into the empty seat on his left. At first Found didn’t see him, or if he did he considered him a shadow in the corner of his eye. And Harry sat still and quiet in the very corner of the cab, pressed against the door with his face and upper body turned towards the driver. He kept his eyes three-quarters shuttered, studying Johnny’s face, which had seemed previously scarcely to match up with any of the descriptions given him by the girls, but which he now saw to be very terrible indeed.
As for Johnny himself: he knew that it was all over. Too many people had seen him tonight, in the diner, the car park, with or close to the girl. Indeed, it seemed to him that he’d been set up. They had traced him, then trapped him with a girl who was the image of one of his victims. And he had fallen for it. Well, two of the bastards at least had paid for it, and the girl would pay, too, when he climbed into the trailer with her, chopped a passage through the orbit of her left eye and fucked her brain!
These were his thoughts, which Harry, looking directly at him, read as clearly as – more clearly than – the pages of a book. And if before there had been any doubt at all in the Necroscope’s mind that his intended course of action was the right one, these were also the thoughts which dispelled it. Now, as Johnny dwelled more intimately on the pleasures he intended taking with or from the girl, Harry very quietly spoke up and said: ‘None of those things will happen, for the girl isn’t in the trailer. I freed her. As I intend freeing all of the dead. From their terror, Johnny. From your tyranny.’
Pound’s jaw had fallen open at the first word. There was a trickle of saliva, slime, froth, in the left-hand corner of his mouth, which now ran down under his lip and into the dimple of his chin. He said ‘Who – ?’ and his coal-black eyes slowly slid to the left in their deep sockets . . . then stood out like inkblots on the gaunt parchment which until a moment ago had been the flushed, bloated flesh of his face.
‘You’re a goner, Johnny,’ Harry told him, and opened his furnace eyes to reflect ruddily on the other’s paralysed, astonished features.
But Pound’s paralysis was short-lived, and the rest of it – his almost immediate response – was all instinct, so that not even the Necroscope could have seen it coming. ‘What?’ he gurgled, taking his left hand from the wheel and reaching up behind his head for a meat-hook where it hung from the cab’s frame. ‘A goner? Well, one of us is, that’s for sure!’
Harry’s plan had been simple: as Found attacked him, he’d conjure a Möbius door and wrestle him through it. But it was difficult enough just to take hold of a man in the cab of a truck, let alone when he was wielding a meat-hook.
Johnny had seen the huge bloodstain on Harry’s jacket and recognized him as the one he’d shot back in the diner’s vehicle park. How he came to be in the cab was something else, but he surely wouldn’t be much good for anything with a gaping hole in his shoulder. And even less good when Johnny was finished with him. ‘Whoever you are,’ he grunted, swinging the hook, ‘you’re dead fucking meat!’
The blow was awkward and left-handed, but still Harry couldn’t avoid it. He ducked down a little and the question mark of shining metal passed over his right shoulder, swooped down on him and caught in the hole which the bullet had torn out of his back. He gasped his renewed agony as Found yanked him towards him and glared into his face. Then –
– Using Harry as a counterweight, the necromancer lifted his left leg, reached it across Harry’s knees and kicked open the cab door. And as the truck careened down the twin lanes he kicked again, this time at Harry himself, and simultaneously released his hold on the meat-hook.