telephone's speaker. And the cable was like a leash that lashed with the living head's frantic motion, then stretched itself taut as the awful thing it anchored strained on it, turning Harry's arm inwards towards his gasping, utterly astonished mouth! The head was trying to get at him, bite him, crush his face in its slavering, fetid mantrap jaws!
'Almighty G-God!' Harry gasped, tightening his fist to a knot in the ruff of coarse fur, trying to force the head back while bringing his left hand into play as he fought to protect his face. The wolfs gaping, snarling muzzle was black leather flecked with white foam; its unbelievable teeth were ivory yellow; its ears lay flat to its head, seeming to streamline the horror of its intentions as they pointed the whole gnashing, clashing monstrosity of a visage at the Necroscope. Then -
- That tunnel of teeth closing on Harry's flapping left hand, where he felt bones snap in at least three of his fingers, and the searing agony of flesh severed, shorn through!
And paws as big as his hands were elongating themselves out of the telephone's speaker, followed by a long grey slime-damp body, as if the telephone was giving birth to this Thing! And the jaws were clashing inches from his face; they slopped blood and bits of mangled, twitching finger! And the grey fur of the beast's ruff tearing in his right hand, coming out in scurvy, matted tufts!
He ... he couldn't hold it off!
And worst of all, the intelligence in those yellow-cored, murderous, oh-so-knowing eyes, as the red-ribbed throat of the monster expanded to engulf his face, his head!
Harry screamed gurglingly but unashamedly, thrusting himself back so spastically, with such force in his driving legs, as to topple his chair over backwards.
And as if from a million miles away, the heavy pattering of raindrops on glass, and a flash of lightning at last. Then thunder clattering mightily close by, and a gust of wind hurling open the patio doors.
Harry's Ma came rushing in through the doors, crying:
Harry! Good God, son ... what sort of a dream was that!?
And his Ma was all mud and bones and weed, but that was okay because it was how she had always been. But he also knew she shouldn't be here, that she wasn't here except... except in his head ... ?
Harry?
And, 'Ma!' he gasped, panted, choked, where he lay sprawled on the floor, with the rain hissing in his face, and a wind howling from the garden, whirling his pages of loose-leaf notepaper in a dervish dance all around the room.
Dream? Of course it had been a dream! But had she really needed to ask what sort?
'A nightmare, Ma,' he told her, where her drowned spirit lay deep in mud and weeds in a bight in the river that was her grave. 'A f-fucking godawful n-n-nightmare!' For the first (and probably the last) time in his life, the Necroscope Harry Keogh had uttered a curse word in the presence of his beloved Ma.
But he needn't worry, for his Ma had 'seen' his dream and understood ...
HARRY: PRESENTIMENTS AND PRECAUTIONS BONNIE JEAN:
V
HARRY: PRESENTIMENTS AND PRECAUTIONS BONNIE JEAN: THE ROUTE TO THE LAIR
'Ma,' Harry said, after he'd stopped shivering. 'Do you think it's possible I'm going ... wel, maybe a litle crazy?'
Do you mean really crazy? (His long-dead mother was careful how she answered him). Do you mean mad? If so, then I think it's highly unlikely. If that were going to happen at all, son, then surely it would have happened some time ago? But after all you've been through - which really doesn't bear thinking about -1 think it's very possible that you're suffering from stress, anxiety, pressure. And who knows?
Perhaps you're physically ill too. I mean, with an ordinary illness?
'My eyes? My sore throat? The fluff in my head?' He blinked watering eyes and swallowed hard to try to ease his throat.
Flu, if ever I saw a dose! his Ma told him. All the classic symptoms. You're suffering from the backlash of living down in London. I was only there once - oh, thirty years ago, when I was a girl - and then only for a few weeks, but it did the same to me! All that smog, the smoky trains and dirty railway stations. Not only that, but didn't I warn you against coming down to the river to talk to me? Not in this bad weather, Harry! Not when you could just