Necroscope V Deadspawn - By Brian Lumley Page 0,124

Johnny turned eight. Indeed until then, their lives might even be described as idyllic.

But that was when David Prescott started having problems with his birds; and the family cat - a placid, neutered torn called Moggit, who slept with Carol and was the apple of her eye - went out one morning and never came back in; and there were long periods of that hot, sultry weather which irritates, exacerbates, and occasionally causes eruptions. And it was the same summer when David built a pool for the kids, and roofed it over with polythene on an aluminium frame.

Johnny had thought it would be great fun, swimming and fooling around in his own pool, but he soon became bored with it. Carol loved it, however, which annoyed her adopted brother: he didn't care for people enjoying things which he didn't enjoy, and in any case he didn't much care for Carol at all.

Then, one morning three or four days after Moggit had gone missing, Johnny got up early. He didn't know it, but Carol was awake and throwing her clothes on as soon as she heard his door gently opening and closing. Her brother (she always put a heavy sneering accent on the word), had been getting up early a lot recently - hours before the rest of the household - and she wanted to know what he was doing. It wasn't especially malicious of her, but the fact was she was a little jealous and more than a little curious. Even if Johnny was a pig, still she'd rather have him playing with her in the pool than off on his own playing his stupid, mysterious, lonely games.

As for Johnny: his time was all his own now and no one to make demands on it. School was out for the summer holidays; he had 'things' to do; he could usually be found beyond the garden wall, in the hedgerows where they blended into meadow and farmland that stretched out and away to the north and north west. But he would always come when he was wanted (a loud call would usually bring him home directly), and he was sensible about getting back for mealtimes.

Just what he did out there all the hours of the day was something else. If his foster-parents asked him, he would say, 'Playing,' and that was all. But Carol wanted to know what it was he played at. It was beyond her that he could find anything more interesting than the pool. So she went out after him, tiptoeing past her parent's room, into the early morning light where dawn hadn't long cracked the horizon with its golden smile.

Johnny went down past the pool under its polythene blister to the garden wall. He climbed the high wall at a well-known spot, jumped down the last few feet on the other side. And he started out along the overgrown hedgerow into the maze of fields shimmering in the morning light. And Carol right after him.

Half a mile into the fields, at a junction of ancient, rutted, overgrown tracks, the jumbles of a ruined farm lay humped and green with flowering brambles and clumps of nettles, where sections of broken, grey-lichened wall and the buttressed mass of an old chimney poked up in teetering stacks of stone. Johnny cut diagonally through a meadow and only his dark head, shiny with sweat, could be seen above the tall, swaying grass.

From where she balanced precariously on top of a disused stile, Carol saw where he was heading and resolved to follow him. The old ruin was obviously Johnny's secret place, where he played his secret games. But they wouldn't be secret much longer.

Johnny had disappeared somewhere into the tumble of fallen, weed-grown walls by the time his sister came panting out of the meadow. She paused a while and looked this way and that, along the tracks which had once serviced the farm, then made to cross them to the ruins... and paused again!

What was that! A cry! The cry of a cat? Moggit?

Moggit!

Carol's hand flew to her mouth. She drew a gasping breath and held it. What, poor little Moggit, lost somewhere in the shell of this crumbling old pile? Maybe that was what had drawn Johnny here: the sound of Moggit, jammed in some hole, trapped and starving in this tottering ruin.

Carol thought to call out in answer to Moggit's strange, choking cries and maybe bring him a little hope; but then she thought no, for that would