10 - Resurgence by Brian Lumley

Author:Brian Lumley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 1997-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

Darcy Clarke took Harry to King’s Cross in the greyest, ghostliest hours of morning when the ragged ones are out: discarded pages from yesterday’s newsprint, drifting aloft on the draughts from canyon street-junctions. Those ragged ones, and the other sort: the stumbling kind, with their bottles of nameless stuff in paper bags. Both sorts were thinning out, however, and disappearing wherever they disappear to. London was coming awake, however slowly, and the station already noisy, thronging with people. The Necroscope caught the first train north.

He had seemed irritable, and Darcy himself wasn’t entirely awake yet, or he might have simply dropped Harry at the station and returned to E-Branch HQ. Finally, on his way back, suddenly he realized what the problem had been—and felt like kicking himself. The Necroscope would have preferred to go home by his own route, maybe, but he hadn’t been able to because Darcy was in the way. Oh, well, too late now.

But in fact it wasn’t.

The train was barely fifteen minutes out of the station before Harry bought himself a paper cup of vile coffee in the buffet car. Then, swaying right on through the cramped buffet area into the first-class coach, he checked the passengers.

There were only a handful of them, reading newspapers and magazines, all facing forward and away from him. And no one in the buffet car behind him. Perfect.

Without thinking about it (because he knew that if he did he wouldn’t), he conjured a Möbius door and stepped through it, and out again into his study in Edinburgh …

… Where he dropped his coffee from nerveless fingers! And before he was capable of rational thought, he thought: This has to be my punishment for using the Continuum!

His coffee had splashed the naked thigh of the black girl, the black and red girl, where he had stumbled over her. Zahanine! … One of B.J.’s girls! … Dead! … Here!

Still without thinking what he was doing, numb, he went to the kitchen and came back with paper towels, got down and wiped the cold coffee from her thigh—then slowly balled the towels, tossed them aside, and jerked spastically to his feet.

Coffee? Jesus God in heaven—coffee? A black bullet hole gaped in the girl’s left breast; her skirt was bunched up round her waist, and her blouse was stuck to the throw rug with dried blood! Indeed, the rug was drenched in blood! Worse, Zahanine’s head lay under Harry’s desk where it had been kicked, three or four feet from her body. A bloody meat cleaver lay there, too.

And this charnel house was his study.

The Necroscope stumbled back from the girl’s body—from everything—and fell into his chair; and sprang out of it at once as he heard a car pull up out front.

In the corridor, still not knowing what he was doing, but trying desperately hard to pull it all together, Harry went to the door and found it shut but unlocked. As he reached to engage the security catch, he heard footsteps that paused beyond the door, a double knock, and a breathless: “Harry?”

B.

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