Necroscope: Harry and the Pirates: and Other Tales from the Lost Years Read Free Page B

work on behalf of a special branch of Her Majesty’s Secret Services.
    Now Jimmy sighed, shook his head, and said, “I still can’t tell whether you’re serious or not! But you’re weird and that’s for sure! What was it you were muttering to yourself when I was coming out of the house? You were asleep, or almost asleep. You were very still and quiet and seemed to be holding your breath, as if you were straining to hear someone or something. Then you began to mumble to yourself and I think I heard you say, ‘What? Who? Where?’ Something questioning like that, anyway. Now what was that all about? A nightmare maybe? Or rather, a daymare?”
    Harry shrugged, and answered: “A bad dream? I suppose it’s possible.” And after sipping thoughtfully at his drink, he continued: “In which case maybe I should be grateful that you woke me up, eh? But whatever it was—and since I can’t remember anything about it, it couldn’t have been too important. No, it was just a common—‘or garden’—dream, that’s all. No big deal.”
    And perhaps it really wasn’t such a big deal; but now that Jimmy had started him thinking about it—wondering why he’d seemed to be, what, “straining to hear someone or something?”—suddenly Harry wasn’t nearly so sure about that. . . .
     
    The fact was that the Necroscope
had
been hearing—or rather, sensing—things for some time now. The talent he had inherited from his female forebears (a talent which some, including Harry himself, might from time to time more readily consider a curse) was gradually becoming more acute in him. If it had been purely physical, as in diseased, malfunctioning hearing, then it might be diagnosed as tinnitus or a similar disorder. But how to diagnose a
meta
physical—indeed a parapsychological—condition as grotesque as this one, involving things which Harry “heard” not with his ears but with his mind? In a future as yet unimagined and unimaginable, he would name his dubious talent “deadspeak” when usingit to communicate with deceased
people
. As for what he was experiencing now, however—
    —While some of the things that “spoke” to or “informed” him were most definitely dead, they were
not
always people. . . .
    In addition to which, there were perfectly normal mechanical sounds which Harry heard, naturally enough, with his ears. Out in the privacy of Jimmy’s walled garden, for instance, the buzzing of bees in the roses and flower borders wasn’t the only sound; there was also the infrequent drone of an airplane from on high, the sound of traffic from the main coast road, even the near-distant
clicketty-clack
of steel wheels on rails, wafting on the balmy summer air right across the sleepy village from Harden’s old railway viaduct.
    Of course, these were sounds that Harry heard like so much white noise—sounds he expected to hear—which in no way registered as other than ordinary. . . .
    In that selfsame garden, however, beneath the overhang of inward-sloping terra-cotta tiles where they decorated the top of the high wall, several spiders had their webs, all more or less evenly spaced out so as to avoid territorial disputes. In those web larders of the spiders, the tiny corpses of flying—or at least once-flying—insects were neatly cocooned and hung like game to ripen. If Harry were to concentrate on these small dead creatures he would actually—and
had
actually—become conscious of a certain sensation, awareness or intuition: the merest glimmer, as faint in his unique mind as the fantasised sound of a snowflake’s fall to earth might be in his ears. He had traced this
un
-sound to the fly mummies under the tiles.
    And yet this was more than mere intuition, for Harry sensed the surprise, bewilderment, even the
indignation
of the drained midges. It was in a way “sentience”—according to that word’s definition, at least—if not as men would normally understand and accept it. But in his mind it registered