Necroscope V Deadspawn - By Brian Lumley Page 0,141
late, too late! 'I don't want to leave you here now,' he told her. 'You'd better come with me.'
'But where?'
He took her into the house, ran through the rooms turning on all the lights, quickly returned to her. And he showed her Johnny's knife, with her name on it. She gasped and drew back from him. 'Can you imagine him?' he asked her, his voice dark as a winter night. 'Can you picture him looking at this and remembering your pain and his pleasure?'
She shuddered. 'I ... I thought I'd forgotten. I've tried to forget.'
'You will forget.' He nodded. 'And so will I ... when it's over. But I can't leave you here, and I have to finish it with him.'
'Will I see him?' She turned pale at the thought.
Harry nodded. 'Yes.' His scarlet eyes lit in a strange smile. 'Yes - and he will see you!'
'But you won't let him hurt me?'
'I promise.'
Then I'm ready...'
One hour earlier on Waverley station in Edinburgh, Trevor Jordan had boarded the overnight sleeper for London. He'd made no plans as such; tomorrow morning, early, he would probably give E-Branch a ring and see if he could sniff out which way the wind was blowing. And if it felt right he'd offer them his services again. They'd check him out (in the circumstances it was only to be expected) and of course they'd want to know all about his experiences with Harry Keogh. But he'd make sure that all of that took time, and by then Harry wouldn't be here any more. In the event he was still here, Jordan would cry off any work that went against him.
Not out of fear but respect, and out of gratitude... yes, and if he was truthful out of fear, too. Harry was Harry and a vampire. In that respect, anyone who didn't feel at least some trace of fear had to be an idiot.
The telepath had paid for a bed but couldn't sleep. There was just too much on his mind. He was a man back from the dead and he couldn't get used to it, probably never would. Not even a man who makes a full recovery from a desperate illness could feel like Jordan felt. For he had gone beyond illness - beyond life itself- and returned. And it was all down to Harry.
Unknown to Jordan, unknown even to Harry himself, was the fact that there was a lot more than that down to him. For the one thing Jordan hadn't taken into account was that Harry had been in his mind: the Necroscope had touched upon his mind - 'fingered' it, however briefly -but enough that he'd left his prints there. And no way to erase them.
To E-Branch - certainly to the two espers who had followed Jordan on to the train, one a spotter and the other a telepath - those prints took the form of a reeking mental mist called mind-smog. Of course, they couldn't probe too deeply, because Jordan was himself a quality telepath and he'd know it; indeed Gareth Scanlon, one of the two men who shadowed him, had once been Jordan's pupil, brought on by him until his own talent had matured and taken shape. Jordan would know his mind (not to mention his face, his voice) immediately. Which was why the two kept well away from him, boarded a carriage far down the train, on the other side of the buffet car, and sat for the first part of their journey with their hats on, hiding behind newspapers which they'd already read four or five times.
But Jordan never once headed in their direction or sent a single thought their way; he was satisfied just to sit in his sleeper compartment, listen to the clatter of the wheels on the tracks, and watch the night world roll by beyond his window. And be glad he was once more a part of that world, without once pausing to wonder for how long.
As the train slowed down a little for a viaduct crossing between Alnwick and Morpeth, Scanlon sat up straighter in his seat and closed his eyes in sudden, half-fearful concentration. Someone was trying to get through to him. But the thoughts were sharp, clean and entirely human, with nothing of vampire mind-smog about them. It was Millicent Cleary at the HQ in London, from where she, the Minister Responsible and the E-Branch Duty Officer were co-ordinating and running the show.