‘My wish?’ Harry’s voice was gaunt as his face. ‘Sometimes I wish to fuck I’d never been born!’
And now Jordan sensed it: Harry’s duality – the strange tides in his blood, eroding the coastline of his will – the horror which challenged his human ascendancy even now, whose challenge was strengthening hour by hour, day by day.
You’re tired, Harry. Maybe you should take it easy for a while. Get some sleep.
‘At night?’ The Necroscope chuckled, but drily, darkly. ‘It’s not my nature, Trevor.’
You have to fight it.
‘I’ve been fighting it!’ Harry’s growl was deeper. ‘All I do is fight it.’
Jordan was silent for a moment. Then: Maybe . . . Maybe we should give it a break now. His deadspeak was full of trembling. Harry could feel his fear, the terror of a dead man. And to his innermost self, where Jordan couldn’t reach:
Oh, God! Even the dead are afraid of me now.
He stood up abruptly, starting to his feet so as almost to topple his chair. And lurching to the curtains he looked out through an inch of space where the drapes came together, across the river and into the night. At which precise moment, on the far river bank and under the trees there, someone struck a match to light a cigarette. Just for a second Harry saw the flare before it was cupped in the windshield of a hand. And then there was only a yellow glow, brightening when the watcher took a deep drag.
The bastard’s out there right now,’ Harry spoke, almost to himself.
It might as well be to himself, for Jordan was too frightened to answer . . .
5
The Resurrected
At midnight Harry was still seething.
He invoked Wellesley’s talent, crept out into his garden and down the path to where the old gate in the wall sagged on its rusting hinges. The night was his friend and like a cat he became one with the shadows, until it would seem there was no one there at all. Looking through the gapped gate, across the river, his night-sensitive eyes could plainly see the motionless figure under the trees: the mind-flea, Paxton.
‘Paxton . . .’
The word was like poison on Harry’s lips and in his mind … his mind, or that of the creature which was now a growing part of him. For Harry’s vampire recognized the threat even as did the Necroscope himself, except it might deal with it differently. If he would let it.
‘Paxton.’ He breathed the name into the cool night air, and his breath was a mist that drifted to the path and swirled around his ankles. The dark essence of Wamphyri was strong in him now, almost overpowering. ‘You can’t hear me, you bastard, can you?’ He breathed mist which flowed under the gate, across the overgrown river path, down among the brambles and on to the glassy water itself. ‘You can’t read me; you don’t know I’m here at all, do you?’
But suddenly, coming from nowhere, there was a gurgling, monstrous voice – unmistakably that of Faéthor Ferenczy – in Harry’s mind: Instead of shrinking back when you sense him near, seek him out! He would enter your mind? Enter his! He will expect you to be afraid; be bold! And when he yawns his jaws at you, go in through them, for he’s softer on the inside!
A nightmare voice, but one which Harry himself had drawn from memory. For Wellesley’s talent made any other sort of intrusion impossible; Faéthor was gone now where no man could ever reach him; he was lost for ever in future time.
That father of vampires had been talking about his bloodson Janos, but it seemed to the Necroscope that the same techniques might well apply right here, right now. Or perhaps it didn’t seem so to Harry, but to the thing inside him. Paxton was here to prove Harry was a vampire. Since he was a vampire, there seemed no way he could disprove it. But must he simply sit still and wait for the consequences of this flea’s reports? The urge was on him to even the score a little, to give the mindspy something to think about.