Necroscope V Deadspawn - By Brian Lumley Page 0,123

ward. And only then, away from God's house, had he fallen silent.

The ambulance which whirled him to the hospital carried his mother, too, found seated against a headstone in the churchyard in a pool of her own blood, head lolling on her swollen breasts. Except unlike Johnny she didn't survive the journey. Or perhaps she did, for a little while...

A strange start to a strange life, but the strangeness was only just beginning.

In the intensive-care ward Johnny had been washed, cared for, given a cot and, for the moment - and indeed for all his life - a name. Someone had scribbled 'Found' on the plastic tag which circled his little wrist, to distinguish him from all the other babies. And Found he'd stayed.

But when a nurse had looked in on him to see why he'd stopped sobbing and gone quiet so suddenly... that had been the weirdest thing of all. Or perhaps not, depending on one's perspective. For his young mother hadn't been quite dead after all. And perhaps she'd heard the babies crying and had known that one of them was hers. That must be the answer, surely? For what other explanation could there be?

There Johnny's unnamed, unknown mother had sat, beside his empty cot; and Johnny in her dead arms, sucking a dribble of cold milk from a dead, cold nipple.

Johnny was at an infant orphanage until he was five, then fostered for three more years until the couple who had taken him split up in tragic circumstances. After that he went to a junior orphanage in York.

About his foster parents: the Prescotts had kept a large house on the very outskirts of Darlington, where the town met the countryside. At the time they adopted Johnny in 1967, they already had a small daughter of four years; but there had been problems and Mrs Prescott was unable to have more children. A pity, for the couple had always planned to be the 'perfect' family unit: the pair of them, plus one boy and one girl. Johnny would seem to fit the bill nicely and make up the deficiency.

And yet David Prescott had been uneasy about the boy from the very first time he saw him. It was nothing solid, just - something he could never quite put his finger on - a feeling; but because of it things were just a little less perfect than they should be.

Johnny was given the family name and became a Prescott - for the time being, anyway. But right from the start he didn't get along with his sister. They couldn't be left alone together for five minutes without fighting, and the glances they stabbed at each other were poisonous even for mismatched children. Alice Prescott blamed her small daughter for being spoilt (which is to say she blamed herself for spoiling her), and her husband blamed Johnny for being... odd. There was just something, well; odd about the boy.

'Well, of course there is!' His wife would round on him. 'Johnny's been a waif, without home and family except in the shape of the orphanage. Yes, and that wasn't the best sort of place, either! Love? Suffer the little children? They seemed altogether too eager to be rid of him, if you ask me! Precious little of love there!'

And David Prescott had wondered: With reason, maybe? But what possible reason? Johnny isn't even six yet. How can anyone turn against a child that small? And certainly not an orphanage, charged with the care of such unfortunates.

The Prescotts had a corner shop which did very nicely, a general store that sold just about everything. It was less than a mile from their home, on the main road into Darlington from the north, and served a recently matured estate of some three hundred homes. Working nine till five four days a week, and Wednesday and Saturday mornings, they made a good living out of it. With the help of a part-time nanny, a young girl who lived locally, they were not overstretched.

David kept pigeons in a loft at the bottom of their large secluded garden; Alice liked to be out digging, planting and growing things when the day's work was done; they took turns seeing to the kids on those occasions when their nanny took time off. So that apart from the friction between Johnny and his sister Carol, the lives of the Prescotts could be said to be normal, pleasant and fairly average. Which was how things stood until the summer when