And when Harry was done with him, then he delivered Paxton back to the garden of the burning house, where the men from E-Branch had moved down to the river wall away from the heat of the conflagration. Against a backdrop of roaring, gouting gold and crimson fire, Harry emerged from the Möbius Continuum and tossed a snivelling Paxton into Ben Trask's arms.
The telepath at once collapsed in tears, sank raggedly to his knees and hugged Trask's legs. Looking down at him, Trask was aghast. 'What have you done to him?'
'Neutered him,' said Harry.
'What?'
Harry shook his head. 'Not his balls, his telepathy. Mental emasculation. He's raped his last mind. And where the Branch is concerned, I've done you my last favour.'
'Harry?'
'Look after yourself, Ben.'
'Harry, wait!'
But the Necroscope was no longer there.
He stood off for long moments along the river and watched the old house burn. What was it Faéthor Ferenczy had called his castle in the Khorvaty, when finally that morbid pile had been reduced to rubble? His last vestige on Earth? Well, and this obsolete old house had been Harry's last vestige.
In this world, anyway…
On a beach of gleaming white sand on the other side of the world, Penny had fashioned a bikini for herself from strips of Harry's bedsheet. Now, walking at the rim of the ocean, she picked up and examined exotic shells where they littered the tide's reach. Strangely (because she usually tanned without difficulty, and also because her as yet innocent mind hadn't recognized the significance of it) she found the sun spiteful; her exposed skin was already blotched and rapidly turning red. To cool herself, she kneeled in the shallows of a tidal pool and let the sea lave her. Which was when Harry returned and called out to her from the shade of the wind-blasted tree.
She looked up and saw him, and felt the power of his magnetism stronger than ever before. It was love and it was much more than love: he need only command it and there was nothing she wouldn't do for him. She was entirely enthralled. Taking a magnificent conch with her, she ran to him and saw how different he looked. Different and yet the same. Before returning to her, the Necroscope had stopped off somewhere to pick up a wide-brimmed black hat and a long black overcoat; weird gear, Penny thought, for a beach in the heat of the midday sun! Now he reminded her of the grim-faced bounty hunter or undertaker in… how many of those old spaghetti Westerns? Except they hadn't worn dark-tinted glasses.
Where the tree gave its maximum shade, Harry eased off his coat and displayed evidence of his wounds: great mats of blood congealed into rusty scabs which crusted his tatters and glued them to him. Feeling his hurt — indeed, feeling more of it than he felt — Penny unwrapped the strip of soaked cotton sheet from her breasts and dampened the Necroscope's bloodied areas with brine. And then she was able to peel the soiled rags from his now entirely human body. His human-looking body, anyway.
From the front, the bullet hole in Harry's right shoulder didn't look too bad, but from the back it was awful. A chunk of flesh the size of a child's clenched fist had been blown right out of him, and its rim at the top had been ripped by Johnny Pound's hook. But amazingly (to Penny, if not to the Necroscope himself) the wound was already healing. New skin was forming around the crater where flesh and bone had been blasted away, and while the pulp within gleamed red as meat on a butcher's block, still it had almost stopped bleeding.
'It's healing now,' Harry grunted. 'If you just sat there and watched it, you'd see it closing up. Another day, two at most, and there'll be only a scar. Another week and even the restructured bone will have stopped aching.'
Fascinated, drawn to him irresistibly, she clutched his shoulders and turned her lithe, lovely body this way and that, brushing her breasts against the gaping hole in his back. Done on impulse, her eroticism caused the Necroscope a little pain and gave him a lot of pleasure. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the brown of her nipples stained red by blood fresh from his body. But in the next moment, astonished by the strength of her own sensuality, Penny said, 'I…I don't quite know why I did that!'
'I do,' he growled, taking her there on the sand — and in turn being taken — again and again through the long hot afternoon.
It was love and lust and what lovers have done since the beginning of time; but it was other than that, more than that. It was an initiation of sorts, for Harry as much as for Penny. And it proved beyond a doubt how utterly inexhaustible are the Wamphyri and their thralls.
Later… she woke up feeling chilly, saw Harry sitting there with her shell in his lap. His face was gaunt, almost pained. The sun, setting over the rolling ocean, highlighted the rims of hollows in his face like shallow craters in a moonscape. Squinting her eyes until he was little more than a dark silhouette, Penny tried to make this newly perceived Harry less stark. The too-distinct lines melted a little and softened his face, but the pain was still there. Then, when he felt her eyes on him, the mood was broken. And when she sat up shivering, he draped her with his coat.
Picking the shell up, she said, 'It's beautiful, isn't it?'
He gave her a strange look. 'It's a dead thing, Penny.'
'Is that all you see, death?'
'No.' He shook his head. 'I feel it, too. I'm the Necroscope.'
'You feel that the shell is dead?'
He nodded. 'And how the creature it housed died. Well, not feel it, exactly. I… experience it? No, not that, either.' He shrugged and sighed. 'I just know.'
She looked at the conch again, and the sun struck mother-of-pearl from its iridescent rim. 'It isn't pretty?'
He shook his head. 'It's ugly. Do you see that tiny hole toward the pointed end?'
She nodded.
'That's what killed it. Another snail, smaller but deadly
— deadly to it — bored into it and sucked out its life. A vampire, yes. There are millions of us.' And she saw him give a shudder.
She put the shell aside. That's a horrid story, Harry!'
'It's also a true one.'
'How can you know that?'
His voice was harsher now. 'Because I'm the Necroscope! Because dead things talk to me. All dead things. And if they haven't the mind for it, then they… convey to me. And your "pretty" bloody shell? It conveys the slow grind of its killer eating into its whorl, the penetration of its probe, and the dully burning seep of its fluids being drained off. Pretty? It's a corpse, Penny, a cadaver!'
He stood up and scuffed listlessly at the sand, and she said, 'Has it always been like that? For you, I mean?'
'No.' He shook his head. 'But it is now. My vampire is growing. As he grows sharper, so he hones my talents. There was a time when I could only talk to dead people; or rather to creatures I could understand. Dogs go on after death just like we do, did you know that? But now — ' Again his shrug. 'If they were alive once but now are dead, I can feel them. And I feel more and more of them all the time.' He kicked at the sand again. 'You see this beach? The very sand sighs and whispers and moans. A million billion corpses broken up by time and the tides. All of that life, wasted, and none of it ready or willing to lie quiet and still. And every dead thing wanting to know, "Why did I die? Why did I die?"'
'But it has to be that way,' she gasped, frightened by his tone. 'It always has been. Without death, what would be the point of life? If we had forever, we wouldn't strive to do anything — because everything would be possible!'
'In this world — ' he took her shoulders, ' — there's life and there's death. But I know another world where there's a state between the two…' And as it grew dark he told her all about Starside.
When he was done she shivered to the inevitability of it and asked, 'When shall we go there?'