Deadspawn

'Darcy, Darcy!' Trask said again.

'Not possible!' Clarke murmured for the last time, before his eyes filmed over and his head lolled into Trask's lap. And as yet, no one had even called for a doctor or an ambulance.

For long seconds the tableau held... until Paxton broke the silence with, 'Get away from him! Are you crazy? Get away from him!'

Trask and the girl looked at him.

'His blood,' Paxton told them. 'You have his blood all over you! He'll contaminate you!'

Trask stood up and the horror slowly cleared from his eyes. The horror of what had happened, anyway. But his horror of Paxton was something else. 'Darcy will contaminate...?' He started to repeat Paxton, and took a long loping pace towards him. 'His blood will contaminate us?'

'What the hell's wrong with you?' Paxton backed off.

'Darcy was right,' Trask snarled. 'About you.' He pointed at the Minister Responsible. 'And you.' And he took another pace after Paxton.

'Back off!' Paxton warned him, waving his gun.

Trask caught his wrist and twisted it, and his strength was furious. The gun went clattering to the floor. 'He never spoke a truer word,' Trask said, holding Paxton at arm's length like a piece of stinking, rotten meat. 'You don't know anything about vampires except what you've read or been told. You have no experience of them. If you did you'd know that bullets don't stop them - not for long, anyway! But poor Darcy there, if you have any talent at all you'll know that he's stone dead. And you killed him!'

'I ... I...' Paxton struggled but he couldn't free himself from Trask's grip.

'Contaminate?' Trask grated through clenched teeth. He drew Paxton close and rubbed Clarke's blood into his hair, his eyes and nostrils. 'You piece of shit, what could contaminate you?' He drew back a ham of a hand and bunched it into a fist, and -

Trask!' the Minister snapped. 'Ben! Let Paxton go! Let it be! What's done is done. An accident, maybe. A mistake, possibly. But it's done. And it's only one of several things we're not going to like doing.'

Trask's fist hung in mid-air, shaking with its need to crash into Paxton's face. But as the Minister's words sank in, so he tossed the telepath away from him. And lurchingly, almost drunkenly, he went back to Clarke's crumpled, lifeless body.

The Minister said to Paxton, 'Get a doctor... and an ambulance.' Then he saw the look on Paxton's face.

The telepath had recovered both his wits and his nerve; he was cleaning his face with a large pocket handkerchief and shaking his head. His look said, think what you're saying, what you're doing. And out loud he said, 'We don't need a doctor or an ambulance, just an incinerator. Clarke's for burning, by us, right now. Right or wrong, we can't take any chances with him. He's for the fire just as soon as possible. And me, I'm for bathing. Trask, Cleary, I know how you must feel, but if I were you - '

'No, you don't know how we feel.' Ben Trask looked up at him, all emotion gone now from his face.

'Anyway,' Paxton continued, 'I'd bathe if I were you. And right now.'

The Minister indicated the door. 'Go on, then,' he told Paxton. 'Go and arrange... disposal. Do it now - and take a shower, too, if you feel it's necessary - then report back to me.'

And after the telepath had left the room, past the gaping espers where they crowded the corridor: 'Ben,' said the Minister, 'the killing has started. Right or wrong, like Paxton said, it's started. And we both know it has to go on. So from now on I want you in charge of this thing. I want you to run the entire show, until it's sorted out one way or the other.'

Trask stood up, leaned against the wall, looked at the Minister and thought: One way or the other? No, it can only be one way, for the other is unthinkable. Well, someone has to do it, and I'm as experienced as any of them. More than most. And at least if I'm running it I'll know that that idiot Paxton won't be doing any more damage.

In the old days it would have been Darcy, Ken Layard, Trevor Jordan and a handful of others. And Harry, of course. But this time they'd be hunting Harry himself, and that was different. And despite what Clarke had said, it looked as if they'd be hunting Jordan, too. And the girl, Penny Sanderson? Jesus, according to the file she was just a kid! But an undead kid.

'All right?' said the Minister.

And Trask sighed and answered with an almost imperceptible nod. Yes, it was all right. And Paxton could well have been right, too. If there had been something -anything at all - wrong with Darcy...

Trask looked at the girl, her bloodied hands and blouse. 'Shower,' he said, simply. 'And make a good job of it.' Then, when he and the Minister were alone, he said, 'When Darcy's been... burned, we have to scatter the ashes. Scatter them far and wide.' He gave a small shudder. 'For the fact is, Harry Keogh does things with ashes. And I really don't think I ever want to see Darcy again. Not on his feet, anyway.'

9:40 a.m.

Harry Keogh had just finished examining the personnel files at Frigis Express's Darlington depot when three things happened simultaneously. One: the depot clerk, whom Harry had lured from his tiny box of an office with a bogus telephone call, returned unexpectedly. Two: Harry felt a pang - almost a pain - of a sort he'd never experienced before, within his chest, as if someone had doused his heart with ice water. And three: the fading echo of an unrecognized cry bounced off his mind to ricochet into an unreachable metaphysical limbo of its own. And it seemed to the Necroscope that whatever its source, it was intended specifically for him: as if his name had been called from the gulf between life and death.

Deadspeak? But this had been different. Telepathy? Well, maybe. Or a cross between the two? That seemed more likely, and Harry remembered how his mother had described the feelings in her incorporeal heart when a pup called Paddy had been killed by a car on a Bonnyrig road.

So ... had someone died? But who? And why had he cried out to Harry?

'Who the fuck are you?' demanded the burly, short-sleeved, red-headed clerk, as he herded Harry into the shadows of a dusty corner where the metal filing cabinet met the wall. He gaped at the former contents of the cabinet, now spilling across the floor.

Harry barely glanced at the man's suspicious, mottled face and said, 'Shh!'

'Shh!?' the other repeated him, disbelievingly. 'You'll get shh!, breaking in here! Now what's the score?'

Harry was trying desperately to hang on to the diminishing ethereal echo of ... a cry for help? Was that what it had been? 'Look,' he told the very untypical clerk, 'be quiet a minute, will you?' He tried to push by him.

'Why you - !' Blotches of angry red appeared on the man's jowly cheeks. 'A conman and thief, right? I recognize your voice. It was you on the 'phone - right. Well, you picked the wrong man this time, thief!' He grabbed Harry by the lapels and looked as if he was going to butt him in the face.

The Necroscope continued to concentrate on the cry, and at the same time reached out and caught his assailant by the throat. With one huge hand he held him at bay, choking, and with the other he reached up and took off his dark spectacles. The clerk saw his eyes and choked all the more, and commenced windmilling his arms as Harry shoved him effortlessly backwards, driving him across the floor. Finally the clerk's legs hit the edge of his desk and he sat down in a plastic paper tray, shattering it with his fat backside.

Still Harry held him, and still he listened for a repeat performance of the cry. But it was gone now, probably disappeared for ever.

Harry felt anger expanding inside him - felt frustrated, cheated - and his hand on the clerk's windpipe was like iron. His nails bit into the man's flesh as if it were putty, and Harry knew that if he wanted to he could crush his Adam's apple and tear his throat out all in one. What's more, the thing inside was urging him to do it, do it!