the worst thing is, I can't put a time on it, can't advise them of the hour of their salvation. But talking to such as you, and feeling your living warmth, I do believe, of course I do! For if there is nothing left but this darkness, this purgatory of sorts, then why have you come to remind us of the past - if not to provide evidence of a glorious future? For He was, He is, and He shal always be ...
God's messenger? Harry didn't feel like one.
But you are! the preacher was insistent. You bring light in the eternal darkness, Harry, and hope where no hope existed. You ... rekindle the flame! Yes, and I think I know what brings you here: the soul-destroying cries of this demented one, taken before his time. You are here to comfort him. Tell me that I'm right?
Not quite, Harry shook his head, and knew the other would sense it. I can comfort him, well and good. But in fact I'm here to question him. I want to know who killed him, so that I can right the wrong.
Revenge? The voice of the preacher was far quieter now.
An eye for an eye, Harry growled.
You can't find it in you to turn the other cheek?
So that the murderer goes free to kill again?
It's not my way, Harry.
Nor mine, not really. But I'll do what I must.
And in doing so, lower yourself to the killer's level?
Tell that to the dozen or more he's lowered six feet under the sod!
I can't give you my blessing, the preacher shook an incorporeal head.
Give me access, that's all I ask. Call of the others, for they're doing no good and crowding me out.
It was true, Derek Stevens had them all in a state. Every single -inhabitant? - of the place, brought to the brink of what among the dead could only pass for nervous collapse. They knew no peace with him; they could neither converse nor hear themselves think for his noise; they flocked to him with gentle words, and the hardest of them with threats, but nothing they did brought surcease for he was inconsolable. To the world outside, the world of the living, the Muswell Hill graveyard would seem a hallowed place of peace and rest, but to the ones interred here it was now a Bedlam.
Wel, Harry thought to himself, Sir Keenan did try to warn me, after all. But as he seated himself on a nearby slab the tumult fel off a litle, and as the teeming dead felt his presence, they drew back and made way for him. Then gradually, the incorporeal babble tailed off to a hiss of whispers, and finaly a welcome silence, as they waited.
Or almost a silence. For down there in the earth, unheard except by the dead and the Necroscope Harry Keogh, there was a sobbing. A heart not yet melted in corruption lay broken there, a soul with nowhere to flee suffered al the undeserved grief of the grave, and a mind bereft of control, cut off from man's five earthly senses teetered on the brink of total insanity.
to the eye of memory, fleetingly, the Necroscope pictured an illustration from some old book (perhaps the idea of Bedlam had brought it back to mind): of a man lying in a foetal position on a bed of filthy, vermin-infested straw over broken flagstones, with gaunt, drooling, holow-eyed figures shambling to and fro, aimlessly al around. Add to that scene al the protests and the pleading and even the threats of the Great Majority, and Harry couldn't help wondering: is that what it's like for Derek Stevens?
To the teeming dead, the unguarded thoughts of the Necroscope were perfectly audible. And:
Yessss! Stevens sobbed, and huddled to Harry in his mind, crushing to him for his living warmth!
Any other man would have recoiled at once. To be embraced, even in one's mind, by a corpse, isn't a thought to dwel upon. But Harry was the Necroscope, and the dead were his friends. He could no more shrink from Stevens in his grave than from a sick friend in a hospital ward. And so he instinctively wrapped the dead man in his warmth, and let him leech on it a while ... but briefly, for something warned him not to let himself succumb to the other's incurable chil.
But as he drew away:
No! Don't go! Who are you? What are you? A nurse? A doctor? You're alive, I know that, because you're