Harry got down on one knee, put an arm round the boy and stroked the dead pet. And again: 'Shh, boy!' He comforted both of them. And in his mind the pup's whines and yelps quietened to a panting whimper. It could feel again. It felt Harry.
But the boy couldn't be comforted. 'He's dead!' he kept moaning. 'He's dead! Paddy's dead! Why didn't the car hit me and not Paddy? Why didn't the car stop?'
'Where do you live, son?' Harry asked the boy, a towhead of maybe eight or nine.
The other glanced at him through blurred-blue eyes. 'Down there.' He nodded vaguely over his right shoulder. 'Number seven. We live there, Paddy and me.'
Harry took the dog gently into his arms and stood up. 'Let's get him home then,' he said.
The crowd parted for them and Harry heard someone say, 'It's a shame. What a terrible shame!'
'Paddy's dead!' The kid clutched the Necroscope's elbow as they turned the corner into a narrow, deserted street.
Dead? Yes, he was, but… did he really have to be? You don't have to be, do you, Paddy?
The deadspeak answer which came back wasn't quite a bark and it wasn't quite a word — but it was an agreement. A dog will usually agree with his friends, and rarely if ever disagree with his master. While Harry wasn't Paddy's beloved master, he certainly was a new friend.
And the decision was made as quickly as that.
Before they reached the small garden in front of number seven, Harry looked down at the lad and said: 'What's your name, son?'
'Peter.' The other could scarcely get it out past his tears and the lump in his throat.
'Peter, I — ' Harry jerked to a halt. Play-acting for all he was worth, he glanced at the pet in his arms. ' — I think I felt him move!'
The boy's mouth fell open. 'Paddy moved? But he's so bad hurt!'
'Son, I'm a vet,' Harry lied. 'Maybe I can save him. You run quickly now and tell your people what's happened, and I'll take Paddy to the surgery. And whatever happens, I'll be in touch just as soon as I know how bad he is — or how good. OK?'
'But — '
'Don't waste time, Peter,' Harry urged. 'It's Paddy's life, right?'
The other gulped, nodded once, flew to the gate of number seven and through it, and as he vanished pell-mell into the garden Harry conjured a Möbius door. By the time Peter's Ma came out of the house wringing her hands — came flying to see the vet — Harry was at a different address entirely…
The Necroscope had perhaps too few friends among the living, but one of them was an old potter up in the Pentlands who fired his own kilns. Paddy was absolutely dead, no doubt about that, when Harry handed him over to Hamish McCulloch for calcination in one of his ovens. 'It's worth a twenty to me, Hamish,' he told the old Scot, 'if you can bring him down to ashes. Well, if not to me, to his master, a young lad with a broken heart. And I'll pay you for one of your pots, too, to keep him in.'
'I reckon we can manage that, Harry.' Hamish nodded.
'Only one thing,' said the Necroscope, 'be careful how you gather him up. I mean, the young lad wants to know he has all of him, right?'
'Just as you say.' Another nod. And Harry waited for five hours until the job was done, but stayed calm and patient and controlled throughout. For now he was the old Harry who, while he had little enough time left of his own, nevertheless had all the time in the world for this.
And anyway it would serve his wider purposes too, wouldn't it? A little preview of what was to come? A chance to observe any possible… discrepancies? For Trevor Jordan's brain had also been shattered, and Penny's flesh had been torn.
At 10:00 p.m. Harry was down in the spacious, dusty cellar of his old house a mile or so out of Bonnyrig. He'd cleaned the place out as best he could and scrubbed an area in the centre of the stone floor until it was smooth as glass. Old Hamish had told him the weight of the dead pup's body before calcination, so that even if Harry's grasp of maths had been meagre it wouldn't be too difficult to calculate pound for pound the various amounts of chemicals required. His knowledge was anything but meagre and he'd calculated it down into grams.
Finally ashes and chemicals were poured together, making a very small mound in the scrubbed floor space, and Harry was ready. And this time there was no pausing to check if his own personal mind-flea was up and jumping, for this time he wasn't worried for himself but for a little kid who wouldn't be sleeping easy tonight.
Except now that he was ready it all seemed so ridiculously easy. Was this all there was to it? Had he perhaps forgotten something? Had those weirdly esoteric words he'd uttered down in the bowels of Janos Ferenczy's ruined castle — that formula out of hideous aeons — really sufficed to bring about… resurrection? And if so, had it been an act of blasphemy? On the other hand, where was the profit in worrying about that now? If the Necroscope was to be damned for his works then he was already damned. And purgatory has to be something like infinity: if you're to suffer for all eternity, there's no way you can be made to suffer twice as long. Is there?
As always his arguments went in a circle, making his head spin. But suddenly he 'knew' that it was the vampire in him, working to confuse him, and in that same moment he acted and so broke the thread. Directing a rigid finger and his thoughts at the pile of ingredients, he spoke the words of evocation:
'Y'ai 'Ng'ngah,
Yog-Sothoth
H'ee-L'geb,
F'ai Throdog
— Uaaahr
It was like putting a lighted match to a pile of incendiary materials: there was phosphorescent light, coloured smoke, a not-quite-sulphur stench. And there was a yelp!
Paddy, called up from his ashes, came staggering from a mushrooming smoke-ring of rapidly dispersing gas or vapour. His ears and stump of a tail were down, trembling, and he wobbled on legs of jelly which seemed incapable of supporting him. He had returned from death and weightlessness — from incorporeity — to life and substantiality in a moment, but his pup's legs were already unused to it.
'Paddy,' the Necroscope whispered, going down on one knee. 'Paddy — here, boy!' And the little dog fell down, stood up, shook himself so as almost to fall again, and came to him.
Black and white, short in the leg, floppy-eared, a mongrel entirely — and entirely alive!
… Was he?
Paddy, the Necroscope spoke again, this time in deadspeak. But there was no answer.
Paddy lived. Truly.
Half an hour later Harry delivered Paddy to house number seven of a row of neat terraced houses in Bonnyrig. He didn't mean to stay, would escape immediately if he could, but there were things he needed to know. About Paddy. About Paddy's character. Was he the same dog exactly?
And apparently he was. Certainly Peter thought so. Paddy's master had been ready for bed for an hour, but he wouldn't go until he'd heard from his 'vet'. And Paddy's return was a miracle to him, though only the Necroscope knew how much of a miracle.
Peter's father was a tall, thin, callused man, but a kind one. 'The boy told us he thought Paddy must be dead,' he said, pouring Harry a liberal whisky, after Peter and his pup had disappeared for the night. 'Broken bones, blood and brains from his ear, a spine all out of joint — it had us worried. He loves that pup.'
'It looked a lot worse than it was,' Harry answered. 'The pup was unconscious, which made his limbs flop; there was some blood from a few scratches, and that always looks bad; and he'd coughed up some slaver. Shock, mostly.'