But you did take - and not just information - and it most certainly was not of my own free will! So that now I'm a dead friend. Just one of the Great Majority.
A third party asked, 'Find out what some other way?' And Harry gave a small start. But it was only Penny, standing in the doorway with a glass of red wine in her hand. She'd heard the Necroscope apparently talking to himself.
Harry's concentration slipped; Darcy Clarke's dead-speak disintegrated; contact was lost. But Harry wasn't angry. Not with Penny. If he and Darcy had continued, then they probably would have parted on even worse terms. 'Let's go downstairs,' he said. 'Out into the garden. It's a warm night. Are the stars out? I'd like to look at the stars. And think.'
He would like to look at his stars, yes: the familiar constellations. For who could say, maybe it would be his last opportunity. And the stars over Starside were very different. And he would like to think. About what Penny had said, for one thing: did he really need to even the score with Johnny Found? And why the hell should he want to know who had killed Darcy Clarke? Darcy wasn't himself vengeful, was he?
And then there was Ken Layard and his gift. Harry was now a locator. Well, and he always had been, to an extent.
Telepathically, he could readily seek and discover others of his acquaintance, such as Zek Föener and Trevor Jordan. And given an introduction to a dead person, from then on he'd always been able to find his way to that person's graveside. And no matter the distance, he'd rarely had difficulty conversing with such dead friends. But now... the teeming dead didn't much want to speak to him any more.
Some do, said another voice in his metaphysical mind, one which laved him like a shower on a sweltering hot day. It was Pamela Trotter, and she was a breath of fresh air.
Penny had come into the garden with the Necroscope, but of course she hadn't heard Pamela's deadspeak. Harry sent her indoors; if not, she would only talk to him, question and distract him. But turning away towards the house she looked as if she might cry, and so he said: 'I'm not putting you away from me, but I need to be alone for a couple of minutes. After that we'll have lots of time for being together.' Because I'll have to watch you until I'm sure you're just you. Or if it comes to the worst, until I'm sure that you're something else.
His thoughts were deadspeak, or good as, and Pamela picked them up. As Penny went back indoors, so the ex-whore said: A vampire lover, Harry? I'm jealous!
'Well, you shouldn't be.' He shook his head and explained what had happened, the trouble Penny had probably landed herself in.
Hey, I could use that sort of trouble! Pamela retorted. I mean, I really wouldn't mind being undead with someone like you! But... too late for that. I'm not much up to fun and games any more. Maybe just one last time, eh? For the right man, you know?
She went quiet and waited for his answer; a long, pregnant pause which defied him to cry off now. Not that he intended to. Eventually he said, 'You think we should go ahead with it?'
She sighed. Well, no question which one of you is in charge right now.
'Oh?'
You have the upper hand, Harry - the human you. For if your vampire was ascendant you'd have no such doubts. You would know what was right!
Harry gave a snort. 'My vampire would know what to do for the best? The best for my vampire, maybe!'
So what's your problem? (She was becoming impatient with him.) You're one and the same, or will be.
'My problem is simple,' the Necroscope answered. 'If the dark side of me gets its way, the human side loses - perhaps permanently. So maybe I should just let the police have Johnny Found. I know that left to their own devices they'll get him soon enough anyway, because they're right on his tail even now. But - '
- But we had a deal! she cut in. I can't believe you'd want to cry off. I mean, you were so hot for this! Did I let you into my mind - to read what you read there - for nothing? And the other girls? Are they dead for nothing, with no chance to square it? You were the only chance we ever had, Harry. And now you say let the police have him? I mean, fuck the police! Why, they wouldn't even know what to do with him! What, lock him up in a lunatic asylum for a couple of years, then turn him loose to do it again? No! You were right the first time around: he has to pay now. The full price.
He held up his hands. 'Pamela, wait - '
Wait, nothing! You... chickenshit vampire! Have me and the others been digging our way out all this time for nothing?
That took Harry by surprise. 'Others?'
I've made a few friends. And they want to help.
'So.' He shrugged. 'Let them help...'
And after long, wondering moments: Then... you haven't changed your mind?
He shook his head. 'Not for a minute. I was just thinking my way round it, that's all. You're the one who's coming on all excited and changeable.'
She was silent for a count of three, then said, I think that just now, just a minute ago, you deliberately let me run on - or off- at the mouth!
'It's possible,' he admitted, nodding. 'We chickenshit vampires are like that: argumentative just for the sake of it.'
I'm sorry, Harry, (she felt an utter fool), but it's just that we're all set now. And when I homed in on you, it seemed to me you might be reconsidering things.
'No,' he said again, 'just thinking things through - or maybe arguing with myself - for the sake of it. What did you want, anyway?'
He could almost hear her sigh of relief. I was hoping you'd have some idea when we can expect...?
'Soon.' He cut her off. 'It has to be very soon now.' And to himself: Because if I'm going to get Johnny Found, it has to be before E-Branch gets after me. If they're not already after me.
In fact he strongly suspected that they were - no, he knew that they must be - and the night would yet prove him right...
Harry finished his drink and went back inside.
Penny was waiting for him, pale and lovely, and the look on her face begged the question: what's going to become of us? The Necroscope wasn't sure yet, so gave her a kiss instead. Which was when she asked him how it had happened to him. That was something he'd asked himself time and again, until he now believed he had the answer.
Wasting few words, he quickly told her about old Faéthor Ferenczy's place in Ploiesti, Romania: the once-ruins where an ancient father of vampires had lain, where surely by now the bulldozers had levelled everything and a concrete mausoleum was mushrooming to the grey skies. Except the vast hive would not be intended as a memorial to the evil of Faéthor (for he had been secretive to the end, so that no one living today remembered him) but to that of the madman Ceausescu's agro-industrial obsession. Anyway, there was nothing of Faéthor left there now; or, if anything, only a memory. And even then not in the people, only in the earth which the Great Vampire had poisoned.
'I'd lost my talents,' Harry explained. 'I had no dead-speak and was locked out of the Möbius Continuum. But Faéthor told me he could fix all that if I would only go to see him. I was over a barrel and had to do it; but in fact he did give me back my deadspeak, and he assisted in my rediscovery of the Möbius Continuum. But all of that was incidental to his plan, which was to come back, to return as a Power and a Plague into the world of men.
'As to how he would do it: I still don't know if it was an act of evil will or the automatic action of alien nature. I don't know whether Faéthor caused it to come about, or if he knew it would happen of its own accord. I can't be sure it wasn't something he himself set in motion, "with malice aforethought", or simply the last gasp of his own vampire's incredible urge for survival. All I know for sure is that there's nothing more tenacious than a vampire.