. . . And the mist where it had closed on the Necroscope opened up again, and his clotted, gurgling, disembodied voice came out of it, saying, ‘How sorry I am to have to disappoint you.’
Shit! Trask thought, snatching a breath of hot, smoky air as a huge grey hand with nails like rust-scabbed fish hooks reached out of empty space, closed over Paxton’s head and dragged him shrieking out of the garden and right out of this universe. And Harry Keogh’s monstrous voice left hanging on the air, saying: ‘Ben, I’m afraid I just have to do this . . .’
In the Möbius Continuum Harry hurled Paxton away from him and heard his scream dwindling into conjectural distances. He should leave him there, let him spin on his own axis, flailing across parallel infinities for ever, shrieking and sobbing and, if his heart should burst, finally dying a raving madman. But that would be to pollute this mystical place. There had to be a better way – a more reasonable punishment – than that.
He sped after him, caught and steadied him, and drew him close. And there in the Möbius Continuum – whose nature even Harry was only just beginning to suspect or understand, where even the smallest thought has weight -he said to him: Paxton, you’re a miserable creature.
‘Get away from me! Get the f-f-fuck away from me!’
Tsk, tsk! Harry sucked his teeth, which as his blood began to cool were halfway to normal again. And you a telepath! You don’t need to shout in the Möbius Continuum, mind-flea. Just thinking it is enough. And in that selfsame moment Harry knew what he must do.
Of course. Paxton the mind-flea, the mental vampire who lived on the thoughts of others rather than their blood; the thought-thief, the unscratchable itch. How many victims had felt his bite? E-Branch was full of them. And how many more didn’t even know – weren’t equipped to know – that he’d ever been into their minds in the first place?
Or maybe not a flea. Maybe … a mosquito? But in any case, a harmful parasite with a painful, irritating sting. It was high time someone drew that sting. And the Necroscope knew just exactly how to do it.
He entered Paxton’s dazed, terrified mind to search for and discover the telepathic mechanism which was the source of the man’s talent. It was something Paxton had been born with and there was no switching it off; but it could be shielded, buried in psychic ‘lead’ like a rogue reactor, until it melted down or burned itself out trying to break free. Which was precisely what the Necroscope did. He wrapped Paxton’s talent in essence of Wamphyri mind-smog, smothered it in a blanket of ESP-opaqueness, mothballed it in ephemeral and yet almost unbreakable threads of what ordinary people term ‘the privacy of their own minds’. Except that in Paxton’s case, the privacy would be his prison.
And when Harry was done with him, then he delivered Paxton back to the garden of the burning house, where the men from E-Branch had moved down to the river wall away from the heat of the conflagration. Against a backdrop of roaring, gouting gold and crimson fire, Harry emerged from the Möbius Continuum and tossed a snivelling Paxton into Ben Trask’s arms.
The telepath at once collapsed in tears, sank raggedly to his knees and hugged Trask’s legs. Looking down at him, Trask was aghast. ‘What have you done to him?’
‘Neutered him,’ said Harry.
‘What?’
Harry shook his head. ‘Not his balls, his telepathy. Mental emasculation. He’s raped his last mind. And where the Branch is concerned, I’ve done you my last favour.’
‘Harry?’
‘Look after yourself, Ben.’
‘Harry, wait!’
But the Necroscope was no longer there.
He stood off for long moments along the river and watched the old house burn. What was it Faéthor Ferenczy had called his castle in the Khorvaty, when finally that morbid pile had been reduced to rubble? His last vestige on Earth? Well, and this obsolete old house had been Harry’s last vestige.
In this world, anyway . . .
On a beach of gleaming white sand on the other side of the world, Penny had fashioned a bikini for herself from strips of Harry’s bedsheet. Now, walking at the rim of the ocean, she picked up and examined exotic shells where they littered the tide’s reach. Strangely (because she usually tanned without difficulty, and also because her as yet innocent mind hadn’t recognized the significance of it) she found the sun spiteful; her exposed skin was already blotched and rapidly turning red. To cool herself, she kneeled in the shallows of a tidal pool and let the sea lave her. Which was when Harry returned and called out to her from the shade of the wind-blasted tree.