Pale hazel eyes stared back at Harry from a face much given to laughter, which Harry suspected hadn’t laughed for quite some little time. Despite the fact that Clarke was well wrapped-up in duffle-coat and scarf, still he looked cold. But not so much physically as spiritually.
‘That’s right,’ the Necroscope finally answered. ‘I haven’t found them, and that’s sort of killed off my drive. Is that why you’re here, Darcy? To supply me with a new purpose, a new direction?’
‘Something like that,’ Clarke nodded. ‘I certainly hope so, anyway.’
They passed through a door in the wall into Harry’s unkempt back garden, which lay gloomy in the shade of gables and dormers, where the paint was flaking and high windows looked down like frowning eyes in a haughty face. Everything had been running wild in that garden for years; brambles and nettles grew dense, crowding the path, so that the two men took care where they stepped along the crazy-paving to a cobbled patio area, beyond which sliding glass doors stood open on Harry’s study.
The room looked dim, dusty, foreboding: Clarke found himself hesitating on the threshold.
‘Enter of your own free will, Darcy,’ said Harry – and Clarke cast him a sharp glance. Clarke’s talent, however, told him that all was well: there was nothing to drive him away from the place, no sudden urgency to depart. The Necroscope smiled, if wanly. ‘A joke,’ he said. Tastes are like attitudes, given a different perspective they change.’
Clarke stepped inside. ‘Home,’ said Harry, following him and sliding the doors shut in their frames. ‘Don’t you think it suits me?’
Clarke didn’t answer, but he thought: well, your taste was never what I would have called flamboyant. Certainly the place suits your talent!
Harry waved Clarke into a cane chair, seated himself behind a blocky oak desk dark with age. Clarke looked all about and tried to draw the room into focus. Its gloom was unnatural; the room was meant to be airy, but Harry had put up curtains, shutting out most of the light except through the glass doors. Finally Clarke could keep it back no longer. ‘A bit funereal, isn’t it?’ he said.
Harry nodded his agreement. ‘It was my stepfather’s room,’ he said. ‘Shukshin – the murdering bastard! He tried to kill me, you know? He was a spotter, but different to the others. He didn’t just smell espers out, he hated them! Indeed, he wished he couldn’t smell them out! The very feel of them made his skin crawl, drove him to rage. Drove him in the end to kill my mother, too, and to have a go at me.’
Clarke nodded. ‘I know as much about you as any man, Harry. He’s in the river, isn’t he? Shukshin? So if it bothers you, why the hell do you go on living here?’
Harry looked away for a moment. ‘Yes, he’s in the river,’ he said, ‘where he tried to put me. An eye for an eye. And the fact that he lived here doesn’t bother me. My mother’s here, too, remember? I’ve only a handful of enemies among the dead; the rest of them are my friends, and they’re good friends. They don’t make any demands, the dead . . .’ He fell silent for a moment, then continued: ‘Anyway, Shukshin served his purpose: if it hadn’t been for him I might never have gone to E-Branch – and I mightn’t be here now, talking to you. I might be out there somewhere, writing the stories of dead men.’
Clarke, like Harry’s mother, felt and was disturbed by his gloomy introspection. ‘You don’t write any more?’
‘They weren’t my stories anyway. Like everything else, they were a means to an end. No, I don’t write any more. I don’t do much of anything.’ Abruptly, he changed the subject:
‘I don’t love her, you know.’ ‘Eh?’
‘Brenda,’ Harry shrugged. ‘Maybe I love the little fellow, but not his mother. See, I remember what it was like when I did love her – of course I do, because / haven’t changed – but the physical me is different. I’ve a new chemistry entirely. It would never have worked, Brenda and me. No, that’s not what’s wrong with me, that isn’t what gets to me. It’s not knowing where they are. Knowing that they’re there but not knowing where. That’s what does it. There were enough changes in my life at that time without them going off, too. Especially him. And you know, for a while I was part of him, that little chap? However unwillingly – unwittingly? – I taught him much of what he knows. He got it from my mind, and I’m interested to know what use he’s made of it. But at the same time I realize that if they hadn’t gone, she and I would have been finished long ago anyway. Even if she’d recovered fully. And sometimes I think maybe it’s best they did go away, and not only for her sake but his, too.’