Necroscope V Deadspawn - By Brian Lumley Page 0,162

lie quiet and still. And every dead thing wanting to know, "Why did I die? Why did I die?"'

'But it has to be that way,' she gasped, frightened by his tone. 'It always has been. Without death, what would be the point of life? If we had forever, we wouldn't strive to do anything - because everything would be possible!'

'In this world - ' he took her shoulders, ' - there's life and there's death. But I know another world where there's a state between the two...' And as it grew dark he told her all about Starside.

When he was done she shivered to the inevitability of it and asked, 'When shall we go there?'

'Soon,' he told her.

'We can't stay here? I know that place is bound to frighten me.'

'Do my eyes frighten you?' They were like small lamps in his face.

She smiled. 'No, because I know they're your eyes.'

'But they frighten others.'

'Because they don't know you.'

'On Starside I'll build an aerie,' Harry told her, 'where your eyes will be as red as mine.'

'Will they?' She seemed almost eager.

'Oh, yes!' Harry told her. And to himself: You may be sure of it, you poor darling child. For even here and now, as early and unanticipated as this, he could detect the faintest scarlet flush in them...

While she slept in his arms, Harry sat and made plans. They weren't much, just something to do. They kept him from thinking too deeply about his and Penny's imminent departure, its possible perils. About its inevitability.

For it was inevitable - as was the drone of the helicopter whose searchlights came sweeping along the beach from the east. Harry had thought they'd be safe here for ... oh, a long time. But as he reached out and touched the minds of the people in the droning dragonfly airplane he saw that he'd been wrong. They were espers.

The Branch,' he said, perhaps bitterly, waking Penny up and forming Möbius equations in his mind.

'What, even here?' she mumbled, as he shifted her across the continent to a clothing store in Sydney.

'Even here... there... yes,' he said. 'Indeed, anywhere. Their locators will find me no matter where I go; they'll alert their contacts worldwide; espers and bounty hunters will track and trap and eventually burn us. We can't fight a whole world. And even if I could, I don't want to. Because to fight is to surrender - to the thing inside me. And I'd prefer to be just me. For as long as possible, anyway. But tonight we'll lead them all a dance, right? For tomorrow we die.'

'Die?'

'We'll be dead to this world, anyway,' he said.

They chose expensive clothes willynilly, and an expensive leather suitcase in which to pack them. Then, as the store's alarms began to clamour, they moved on.

It had been 9:00 p.m. local time when they left the beach; it was 11:30 in the store they robbed; moving east they got dressed on another beach (Long Beach) at 5 a.m. in the first light of dawn, and started a champagne breakfast in New York a little after 8 a.m. - and all in the space of thirty or so minutes!

Penny ate her steak barbecued, medium rare; Harry's was so rare it dripped blood, just the way he'd ordered it. They drank three bottles of champagne. When presented with the bill the Necroscope laughed, snatched Penny into his lap, tilted his chair over backwards... and the pair of them out of this world into the Möbius Continuum.

Minutes later (at 10:30 p.m. local time) and some three and a half thousand miles north of where they'd started out, they robbed the innermost security vaults of the Bank of Hong Kong; and by midnight they'd lost a million Hong Kong Dollars on the gaming tables in Macau. A few minutes later (at 6:30 in the evening, local), still ordering and drinking champagne, Harry bundled an entirely tipsy Penny into a hotel bed in Nicosia, and left her there to sleep it off. She dripped pearls and diamonds and her skin smelled of a fine haze of alcohol. Most women (were they truthful) would give an entire world for the things she had seen and done and experienced in the last half-day of her life on Earth. So had Penny given a world. That's why Harry had arranged and executed it.

Their binge had taken a little over three hours: the locators at E-Branch HQ in London - and others in Moscow - were quite dizzy. But the Necroscope