just a minute or so ago: A. C. Doyle Jamieson, tall, burly, decked out in his wolf-mask and wearing his glove weapon, lurching like a drunkard in the darkness of the basement, spewing obscenities like the madman he was as he made for his van. The vehicle was parked with its driver's door to the wall; A.C. yanked open the front-seat passenger's door and hurled himself headfirst inside the cab. But before he could reach the controls the motor coughed into life! Someone was in the driver's seat, hunched over the steering wheel, andA.C. knew it could only be one of his enemies! So why hadn't he been able to read him?
The answer was obvious, but of course A. C. couldn't know it: that only the Necroscope, Harry Keogh, can read anything of the dead!
The cab rocked as the van drew out into the central aisle and the driver gunned the motor, heading for the dim square of light that marked the exit ramp. Then the headlights blazed on and iluminated a figure standing dead ahead, a female figure with her arm and hand raised and pointing -or aiming - directly at the cab!
This was a concerted atack; they were acting in perfect co-ordination, al of A.C. Doyle's enemies together! He yelped, ducked, turned and struck with his honed steel claw al in one movement - struck at the face of the man at the wheel. And the face unzipped itself like a banana, its flesh flopping down in strips, then turned to grin at him with scarlet gums and reddened teeth and wet, pus-dripping eyes!
A.C. would have screamed then, but could only go 'Urgh, urgh, urghhh!' as the Thing beside him lay back its grotesque head and gurgled:
'Ow-woooow, wolfman! Ifs silver bulet time!'
But in fact it was crossbow-bolt time: a bolt that came smashing through the windscreen and nailed A. C. 's shoulder to the padding of the seat, where its head jammed in the aluminium back-plate ...
All of this from Jakes's mind as the van reached the top of the ramp and bounded onto the ground-floor level, and turned left, not right, to go revving up the skeletal ramp to the next floor, and the next, and the one after that. All the way to the top. And Harry seeing it through Jakes's dead eyes, but hearing it with his own ears even over the thunder of the van's engine:
A.C. Doyle's shril, agonized, maniacal screaming, as it finaly dawned on him that a man he'd kiled was about to kil him! And: Cheers, Necroscope! Jakes crowed in Harry's metaphysical mind, and he aimed the vehicle at the parapet wall six storeys up.
Thanks for having me in on this. This is for Jim Banks and Derek Stevens, but mainly if s for me. The tank of this bucket is full, and I always wanted to go out this way: in a blaze of glory! Oh and by the way, here's the face of the ugly fuck who caused all of this: And he reached over with a dead hand to rip A.C.'s wolf-mask right off his head. Which was at the same time as the van hit the wall and went through it in a crumbling of rotten mortar and battered concrete, and a shrieking of twisted metal.
Harry staggered back against the wall in the entrance to the" garage, flopped there with his jaw hanging slack, looking at A.C. looking at George Jakes. At the mad, black, screaming face; the claw-hand held up to ward off the very sight of the dead man; dreadlocks flying in the midnight wind as the van's door was shorn from its hinges. The mad eyes almost bursting from their sockets; the thick, foaming lips; the torso beginning to float in free-fall, but pinned to the backrest by the crossbow bolt whose flight stuck out from A.C.'s shoulder.
Let's talk again some time, Necroscope, said Jakes. But right now I just want to savour the warmth ...
Harry shook himself, had time to straighten up and look out into the street... where even now something was crashing down in the centre of the road. And Jakes was right: the van's tank must have been full to brimming.
Under a sky clearing of clouds, in which a bloated moon lit the wet-shining streets of London, A.C.'s van hit like a bomb, nose first, went off like a clap of thunder and blotted out the night with the abrupt brilliance of his funeral pyre. And of George Jakes's.
Which was