Necroscope V Deadspawn - By Brian Lumley Page 0,161

a child's clenched fist had been blown right out of him, and its rim at the top had been ripped by Johnny Pound's hook. But amazingly (to Penny, if not to the Necroscope himself) the wound was already healing. New skin was forming around the crater where flesh and bone had been blasted away, and while the pulp within gleamed red as meat on a butcher's block, still it had almost stopped bleeding.

'It's healing now,' Harry grunted. 'If you just sat there and watched it, you'd see it closing up. Another day, two at most, and there'll be only a scar. Another week and even the restructured bone will have stopped aching.'

Fascinated, drawn to him irresistibly, she clutched his shoulders and turned her lithe, lovely body this way and that, brushing her breasts against the gaping hole in his back. Done on impulse, her eroticism caused the Necroscope a little pain and gave him a lot of pleasure. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the brown of her nipples stained red by blood fresh from his body. But in the next moment, astonished by the strength of her own sensuality, Penny said, 'I...I don't quite know why I did that!'

'I do,' he growled, taking her there on the sand - and in turn being taken - again and again through the long hot afternoon.

It was love and lust and what lovers have done since the beginning of time; but it was other than that, more than that. It was an initiation of sorts, for Harry as much as for Penny. And it proved beyond a doubt how utterly inexhaustible are the Wamphyri and their thralls.

Later... she woke up feeling chilly, saw Harry sitting there with her shell in his lap. His face was gaunt, almost pained. The sun, setting over the rolling ocean, highlighted the rims of hollows in his face like shallow craters in a moonscape. Squinting her eyes until he was little more than a dark silhouette, Penny tried to make this newly perceived Harry less stark. The too-distinct lines melted a little and softened his face, but the pain was still there. Then, when he felt her eyes on him, the mood was broken. And when she sat up shivering, he draped her with his coat.

Picking the shell up, she said, 'It's beautiful, isn't it?'

He gave her a strange look. 'It's a dead thing, Penny.'

'Is that all you see, death?'

'No.' He shook his head. 'I feel it, too. I'm the Necroscope.'

'You feel that the shell is dead?'

He nodded. 'And how the creature it housed died. Well, not feel it, exactly. I ... experience it? No, not that, either.' He shrugged and sighed. 'I just know.'

She looked at the conch again, and the sun struck mother-of-pearl from its iridescent rim. 'It isn't pretty?'

He shook his head. 'It's ugly. Do you see that tiny hole toward the pointed end?'

She nodded.

'That's what killed it. Another snail, smaller but deadly

- deadly to it - bored into it and sucked out its life. A vampire, yes. There are millions of us.' And she saw him give a shudder.

She put the shell aside. That's a horrid story, Harry!'

'It's also a true one.'

'How can you know that?'

His voice was harsher now. 'Because I'm the Necroscope! Because dead things talk to me. All dead things. And if they haven't the mind for it, then they... convey to me. And your "pretty" bloody shell? It conveys the slow grind of its killer eating into its whorl, the penetration of its probe, and the dully burning seep of its fluids being drained off. Pretty? It's a corpse, Penny, a cadaver!'

He stood up and scuffed listlessly at the sand, and she said, 'Has it always been like that? For you, I mean?'

'No.' He shook his head. 'But it is now. My vampire is growing. As he grows sharper, so he hones my talents. There was a time when I could only talk to dead people; or rather to creatures I could understand. Dogs go on after death just like we do, did you know that? But now - ' Again his shrug. 'If they were alive once but now are dead, I can feel them. And I feel more and more of them all the time.' He kicked at the sand again. 'You see this beach? The very sand sighs and whispers and moans. A million billion corpses broken up by time and the tides. All of that life, wasted, and none of it ready or willing to