The Minister was getting peeved. ‘For the moment you have quite enough work on your plate!’ he snapped. ‘Leave Paxton be. A periodic check will suffice – when I say so!’
Clarke was only polite when people were polite to him. He was far too important to let himself be stepped on. ‘Keep your shirt on … sir,’ he growled. ‘Anything I say or do is in the Branch’s best interest, believe me – even when I step on toes.’
‘Of course, of course.’ The other was at once conciliatory. ‘But we’re all in the same boat, Clarke, and none of us knows everything. So for the time being let’s just trust each other, all right?’
Oh, yeah, let’s! Sure! ‘Fine,’ Clarke said. ‘I’m sorry I’ve taken up so much of your time.’
‘That’s all right. We’ll be speaking again soon, I’m sure . . .’
Clarke put the ‘phone down and continued to scowl at it a while, then sealed the envelope containing the police reports and scrawled Harry Keogh’s address on it. He erased his and Keogh’s recent conversation, then asked the switchboard if they’d traced the call. They had and it was Harry’s Edinburgh number. He ‘phoned it direct but got no answer. And finally he called a courier into his office and gave him the envelope.
‘Post it, please,’ he said, but before the courier could leave: ‘No, repackage the whole thing and send it off special delivery. And then forget you ever saw it, right?’
In a little while he was alone with his dark, suspicious thoughts again, and an itch between his shoulderblades which he couldn’t quite get at.
And his mother’s ditty about fleas, which was equally persistent.
3
Changeling
Harry Keogh, Necroscope, didn’t know Darcy Clarke’s ditty, but he did have a flea on his back. Several, in fact. And they were biting him.
Geoffrey Paxton was only one and probably the least of them, but because he was reachable and immediate he was the most frightening. Harry wasn’t frightened of Paxton, rather of what he might do to Paxton if he lost control. And of what losing control might conceivably do to him, to the Necroscope himself. He knew how easy it would be to betray himself and reveal that he was no longer an innocent but that some great and as yet undeveloped (but developing, certainly) Darkness had entered him.
That was what Paxton was looking for, Harry knew: proof that the Necroscope was no longer a fit citizen or habitant of Earth – no longer, indeed, a man, not entirely – but an alien creature and a monstrous threat. And when he knew it for sure, when there was no longer any doubt, then Paxton would report that fact and there would be war. Harry Keogh versus The Rest. The rest of Mankind. And that was the last thing Harry wanted, to be at odds with a world and its peoples which he had fought so long and so hard to keep safe.
Paxton, then, was a flea on Harry’s back, a niggle at the edge of – attempting to dig its way deeper into – his mind, an irritation. And because Paxton’s presence was representative of an even greater threat, which must ultimately challenge the Necroscope’s very existence, it was something Harry could well do without. For to the Wamphyri the single ‘honourable’ answer to any challenge may only be written in blood!
Wamphryri!
The word itself was … a Power.
It was a tingling in the core of his being, an awareness of passions beyond the feeble, fumbling emotions of men, a savage, explosive nuclear energy contained – but barely – in his seething blood. It was a chain-reaction which was happening to him even now, whose catalyst was blood. And in itself it, too, was a challenge. But one which he must resist, which he must not, dare not answer. Not if he desired to remain ascendant and for the most part human.
A flea, then, this Paxton. An invader who would stick his proboscis in that most private and inviolable of all human territories, the mind itself, and siphon out its thoughts. A spy, a thought-thief- a parasite come to sup on Harry’s secrets – a flea. But only one flea of several, and not one whose bites he could afford to scratch.