‘But in another man’s body,’ he answered, wryly.
‘Alec was dead, Harry,’ she made the point bluntly, for there was no other way to make it. ‘He was worse than dead, for there was nothing left of his mind at all – not even of his soul. And anyway, you had no choice.’
Harry’s thoughts, spurred by his mother’s words, carried him back, back to that time eight years ago:
Alec Kyle had been on a mission to Romania – to destroy the remains of a human vampire in the ground there. Thibor Ferenczy had been dead, but he’d left part of himself in the earth to pollute it, and to pollute anyone who went near it. Kyle had succeeded, burned the thing, and was on the point of returning to England when Soviet espers had picked him up. Flown in secrecy to Russia, to the Chateau Bronnitsy, the then HQ of Soviet E-Branch, he’d been subjected to a particularly horrific method of brain-washing. His mind had been electronically drained, his brain literally emptied of knowledge. All knowledge. It wasn’t merely a question of hot white lights, the rubber hose, truth-drugs and the like: the very contents of his mind had been forcibly, needlessly extracted, like a good tooth, and thrown away. And in the process Soviet telepaths had stolen the bits that were useful to them, all the secrets of their enemies, the British espers. When they’d finished with Kyle he’d been alive -been kept alive, for the time being – but his brain had been completely vacant, dead. Taken off life-support, his body too would die. And that had been the intention of his tormentors: to let him die and have his corpse dumped in West Berlin. There wouldn’t be a pathologist in the whole wide world who could state with any certainty what had killed him.
That was to have been the scenario. Except . . . while Alec Kyle had been a husk, an empty mind in a living body, the then Harry Keogh had been mind alone! Incorporeal, a bodiless inhabitant of the Mobius Continuum, Harry had searched for Kyle, found him, and the rest had been almost beyond his control. Nature abhors a vacuum, whether in the physical or metaphysical worlds. The normal universe had no use for an incorporeal being. And Kyle’s brain had been an aching void. Thus Harry’s mind had become one with Kyle’s body. Since then … a great deal had happened since then. Harry forced the scowl from his face, stared harder at his image in the calm river water. His hair (or Alec’s?) was russet-brown, plentiful and naturally wavy; but in the last eight years a lot of the lustre had disappeared, and streaks of grey had become very noticeable. It would not be too long before the grey overtook and ruled the brown, and Harry not yet thirty. His eyes, too, were honey-brown; very wide, very intelligent, and (strange beyond words) very innocent! Even now, for all he’d seen, experienced and learned, innocent. It could be argued that certain murderers have the same look, but in Harry the innocence was mainly genuine. He had not asked to be what he was, or to be called upon to do the things he’d done.
His teeth were strong, not quite white, a little uneven; they were set in a mouth which was unusually sensitive but could also be cruel, caustic. He had a high brow, which now and then he’d search for freckles. The old Harry used to have freckles, but no longer.
As for the rest of Harry’s body: it had been well-fleshed, maybe even a little overweight, once. With its height, however, that hadn’t mattered a great deal. Not to Alec Kyle, whose job with E-Branch had been in large part sedentary. But it had mattered to Harry. He’d trained his new body down, got it to a peak of condition. It wasn’t bad for a forty-year-old body. But better if it was only thirty, like Harry himself.
‘You’re at odds with yourself again, Harry,’ said his mother. ‘What’s bothering you, son? Is it Brenda still, and little Harry?’
‘No use denying it,’ he gruffly answered, with something of an irritable shrug. ‘You never met him, did you? He’d have been able to talk to you too, you know. But … I still can’t get over the way he did it. It’s one thing to lose somebody – or even two somebodies – but quite another to be left wondering why. He could have told me where he was taking her, could have explained his reasons. After all, it wasn’t my fault she was like she was -was it? Maybe it was,’ (again his shrug) ‘I don’t know any more . . .’