was them. But George Jakes was something else. George had been hard hard. And he still was.
And he was soft, too, in places. Or as soft as his rigor mortis would allow. But on occasions like this, the Necroscope was adept at keeping his thoughts to himself ...
Harry and his friends had been taken down into the Unnatural or Suspect Deaths room by a police pathologist in a white surgical smock -rather, it had started out white, but their guide had just finished an autopsy in another room.
Chatting to them in a friendly enough fashion, he cleaned his hands on the smock as he led the way, then stripped off his thin rubber gloves to let the trio into the locked, refrigerated morgue. And leaving them, he told them, 'Drop the key into my room when you're finished.' Which was the only thing they actually heard. The rest of his patter had been drowned out, blurred to a mumble by the morbid aura of the place.
Clarke and Layard followed quietly behind Harry where he went from sliding drawer to drawer, examining labels. But when he stopped at a drawer marked 'George Jakes' they stepped back a little. Darcy admitted to still being queasy from the mess in Oxford Street, and Layard didn't want to see stuff just for the sake of seeing it. But if Harry really needed them
... ? He shook his head and let them leave, then slid open the drawer. And:
What's new, Necroscope? said George Jakes, with a grin of horror on his face that he'd wear forever, or at least until'it rotted off. And before Harry could answer, but in a far quieter mode, as Jakes scanned his visitor's stunned thoughts: Hey, is it that bad? Funny, 'cos I can't feel a thing! But I can remember it - and how! And seeing it in Technicolor doesn't really help. So what say you switch it of now, Necroscope? I mean, I wjas never a one /or watching myself on Home videos, either, you know what I mean? By which time the humorous touch had disappeared entirely from Jakes's voice.
And Harry realized that the dead man had been looking at himself through his eyes.1
He quickly slid the drawer shut, groped for a steel chair to steady himself, sat down heavily in it and said, 'George
... I... What can I say? I'm sorry.' It didn't seem much, but what else could he say?
\teSpiXfcX\a\A\fe taex ms, s\\A, Yisrry co\M stSi see'As contents. They were printed on his mind's eye in al their gory details. But Darcy had been wrong: someone had done something of a job on the corpse, if only to make it bearable. The stitches were ... less than cosmetic. Like a slipshod job on a torn hessian sack, Jakes's corpse seemed to have been sewn together mainly to keep it together, to stop him faling open or even apart.
Harry deliberately put the picture out of mind - to keep it from Jakes's mind - and took a deep breath. Then, remembering what Jim Banks had told him: 'But at least you didn't feel all of it, George,' he
said. 'You couldn't possibly have felt all of it.'
I felt enough, Jakes answered. More than enough to put me down among the dead men! Obviously he wanted to forget it, but knew that he couldn't, not for a little while. So: Let's get on with it, Harry. I know what you want, so let's get started ...
I had no family, Qakes commenced his story). The only real friends I had, and few of them at that, were on the force. I'd been a cop man and boy, since I was eighteen until a couple of weeks ago when I turned forty. And much like you, Harry, I was the one who always got the nasty cases. It just seemed to turn out that way: rapists and murderers and arsonists, pimps, perverts and all the slime that walks the streets, they all seemed to head my way. Hence my reluctance to make more than a handful of friends, take a wife and raise a family. Being that close to all of the shit, I didn't like the idea of contaminating others. Or ... maybe it was a matter of trust. So many people out there seem bent on making it, even over the bodies of the rest of us, that I wasn't willing to put myself in the firing line. I mean, I'd be the best sort of cop I