‘A … a … fucking graveyard!’ he gasped.
And Harry Keogh said, ‘End of the road, Johnny.’
Pamela Trotter said, You kept your promise, Harry. And he nodded.
And Johnny Found, Necromancer, knew what had passed between them. ‘No!’ he gasped. Then screamed: ‘Noooooooo!’
He would get to his feet. Even broken, shattered, cut to ribbons, he would flee from the hell of it. But Pamela’s dead friends fell or flopped on him and bore him down, and a hand that shed rotting flesh and maggots stoppered his mouth. Then she came to him and searched among his rags, until she found his new knife. And close up like that – badly gone into corruption though she was, even with the flesh beginning to slough from her face – still he knew her.
You remember that good time we had? she said. You didn’t even say thanks, Johnny, and you didn’t leave me anything to remember you by. Well, now I think it’s time I had me a small memento. Or even a big one, eh? Something I can take back down into the earth with me, right? She showed him his own knife and smiled at him, and her teeth were long where the blackened gums had shrivelled back from them.
Harry turned away and shut out the sight; shut out Pound’s silent, frenzied shrieking, too, from his mind. But to Pamela he said, ‘Make sure you kill him.’
Except: Too late! She was weeping her frustration. Or rather, too soon! Damn the bastard, Harry, but he’s already died on me!
Harry sighed his relief and thought, Just as well. She heard him and a moment later agreed:
Yes, I suppose it is. Shit, I didn’t want to dirty my hands on this filth anyway!
And now Pound’s deadspeak reached out to both of them, to Harry and to Pamela. What. . . is this? Where . . . am I? Who . . . is it out there?
Neither one of them answered him, but the sheer weight of Harry’s presence impressed itself on Pound’s mind like a light shining in through the stretched membrane of shuttered eyelids. He knew that Harry was there, and that he was special. It’s you, right? he said. The guy with the dark glasses, with some kind of magic. You brought me here with your magic, right?
Harry knew that Pamela would probably never speak to Johnny Found, neither Pamela nor any other of the outraged Great Majority. Instead of taunting the necromancer, they’d merely shun him, lock him up or out, like a leper. So maybe Harry shouldn’t speak to him either but simply go away. And perhaps that would be the most merciful thing to do.
Except . . . Harry had a less than merciful thing inside him, which now caused him to speak up.
You had the same magic, Johnny, he said. Or you could have had. You could speak to the dead – could have trained yourself, as I did, to converse with them and befriend them – but no, you chose to torture them instead.
Found was quick to catch on. So now I’m one of them, right? I’m dead and you did it to me. But just answer me this: why?
Harry could have explained: that he’d needed to focus his Wamphyri passions on something – to have something to let them loose on – rather than people who were previously his friends; which was to say E-Branch and the world in general. He could have explained, but didn’t. For his vampire wouldn’t let him. Found had been the cold, cruel, uncaring one in life; death should be a cold, cruel place, too. And just as uncaring. An eye for an eye.
Why did I kill you? Harry shrugged, began to turn away.
Hey, fuckface! Found shouted after him, defiant, furious even in death. That doesn’t cut it. You had your reasons, sure enough. Because of the dead? Shit! Who gives a fuck for the dead? So come on, tell me … why?
And so – coldly, cruelly and uncaringly – Harry told him. You’re right, he said. No one gives a fuck for the dead. And you, Johnny, you’re dead. You want to know why? And again he shrugged. Well, why the fuck not?