Again Clarke’s nod, and the plain-clothes man swung the door open for him and stepped aside.
‘Now we’re there,’ Harry pre-empted Clarke, causing him to close his mouth on those selfsame words, unspoken. Harry Keogh needed no one to tell him there was a dead person close by. And with one more glance at the Necroscope, Clarke ushered him inside. The officer didn’t follow them but closed the door quietly behind them.
The room was cool: two walls were of natural stone; a rocky outcrop of volcanic gneiss grew out of the stone-flagged floor in one corner and into the walls there. This place had been built straight on to the rock. A storeroom, steel shelving was stacked on one side. On the other, beside the cold stone wall: a surgical trolley with a body on it, and a white rubber sheet covering the body.
The Necroscope wasted no time. The dead held no terrors for Harry Keogh. If he had as many friends among the living, then he’d be the most loved man in the world. He was the most loved man, but the ones who loved him couldn’t tell anyone about it. Except Harry himself.
He went to the trolley, drew back the rubber sheet from the face, closed his eyes and rocked back on his heels. She had been sweet and young and innocent – yes, another innocent – and she had been tormented. And she still was. Her eyes were closed now, but Harry knew that if they were open he’d read terror in them. He could feel those dead eyes burning through the pale lids that covered them, crying out to him in their horror.
She would need comforting. The teeming dead – the Great Majority – would have tried, but they didn’t always get it right. Their voices were often mournful, ghostly, frightening, to anyone who didn’t know them. In the darkness of death they could seem like night visitants, nightmares, like wailing banshees come to steal a soul. She might think she was dreaming, might even suspect that she was dying, but not that she was already dead. That took time to sink in, and the freshly dead were usually the last to know. That was because they were the least able to accept it. Especially the very young, whose young minds had not yet properly considered it.
But on the other hand, if she had actually seen death coming – if she had read it in the eyes of her destroyer, felt the numbing blow, or the hands on her throat, closing off the air, or the cutting edge of the instrument of her destruction, slicing into her flesh – then she would know. And she’d be cold and afraid and tearful. Tearful, yes, for no one knew better than Harry how the dead could cry.
He hesitated, wasn’t sure how best to approach her, not even sure if he should approach her, not now. For Harry knew that she’d been pure, and that he was impure. True, her flesh was heading for corruption even now, but there’s corruption and there’s corruption . . .
Angrily, he thrust the thought aside. No, he wasn’t a defiler. Not yet. He was a friend. He was the only friend. He was the Necroscope.
Be that as it may, when he put his hand on her clay-cold brow she recoiled as from a serpent! Not physically, for she was dead, but her mind cringed, shrank down, withdrew into itself like the feathery fronds of some strange sea anemone brushed by a swimmer. Harry felt his blood turn to ice and for a moment stood in horror of himself. The last thing he’d wanted was to frighten her still more.
He wrapped her in his thoughts, in what had once been the warmth of his deadspeak: It’s all right! Don’t be afraid! I won’t hurt you! No one can ever hurt you again! It was as easy as that. Without even trying, he’d told her that she was dead.
But in the next moment he knew that she had already known: KEEP OFF! Her deadspeak was a sobbing shriek of torment in Harry’s mind. GET AWAY FROM ME, YOU FILTHY . . . THING!