The Minister was quick to add: ‘That last isn’t proven yet. But it is starting to look that way. The thing is, Keogh has had a lot of contact with these creatures. Close contact. Maybe this last time there was a little too much contact.’
Paxton again: ‘Look, I know I’m a relative newcomer, and you don’t much like me, and in the past you’ve all had reason to be grateful for Harry Keogh. But have these things blinded you to the facts? OK, so you don’t want to believe me – don’t even want to believe yourselves – but just think what we’re up against if we’re right.
‘He can talk to the dead, who apparently know a hell of a lot. He uses the Möbius Continuum to go anywhere he wants to, instantly, like we take a step into another room. He’s a telepath. And now he not only speaks to the dead but calls them back, too!’
‘He could do that before,’ said Ben Trask, not without a shudder.
‘But now he calls them back to what looks like life.’ Paxton was relentless. ‘From their ashes! Life? Or undeath?’
At which David Chung gave a mighty start, reeled like someone had hit him, and choked something out in Cantonese. Most of the espers were on their feet by now, but Chung gropingly found a chair and flopped down again. Frowning, the Minister Responsible said, ‘Mister Chung?’
Chung’s pallor gave his face a sickly lemon tint. He wiped his shining brow and licked his lips, and again mumbled something to himself in Chinese. Then he looked up and his eyes were wide. ‘You all know what I do,’ he said, his words a little sibilant and clipped in his fashion. ‘I’m a locator, sympathetic. I take a model or a piece of something and use it to find the real thing. It’s Branch policy that I take and keep safe from each one of you a small item of your personal belongings. This is for your own safety: if you go missing, I can find you.
‘Well, I also have several items belonging to Harry Keogh, stuff he’s left here from time to time . . .
‘I was out in the Mediterranean with the others. I knew Zek Föener had been worried about something, and so I too have been keeping tabs on Harry. I told myself it was for his own good. But I knew what I was doing and what I was looking for.
‘At first when I scried on him it was just him; there was nothing different; it felt right. I got a picture of him, you know? Not doing anything, just a picture of him as I knew him, up there at his home in Edinburgh or wherever he was. But recently the picture has been dim, misty, and last night and this morning there wasn’t much of Harry there at all; just a mist, a fog. I was going to submit a report on it tomorrow.’
‘In the old days,’ Trask said, ‘we used to call that mind-smog. It’s what you get when you try to scan a vampire.’
‘I know,’ Chung nodded. He was more nearly recovered now. ‘It was partly that which hit me, and partly something else. Paxton said that Harry could call dead people up from their ashes. That’s what hit me the most.’
‘What?’ the Minister was frowning again.
Chung looked at him. ‘I also have things which used to belong to Trevor Jordan,’ he said. ‘And this morning, just by accident, I happened to touch one of them. It was like Trevor was right here, right next door or down the street. And I thought it was something out of my memory. It was there and then it was gone. But it just struck me that he very well could have been here, just down the street!’
The Minister still hadn’t taken it in, but Trask soon took care of that. Pale as a ghost, he whispered: ‘My God! Jordan was cremated out in Rhodes, burned to ashes in case he’d been infected with vampirism. But Jesus, now that I think of it, I remember how it was Harry Keogh who insisted on it!’