Resume:
Harry Keogh inherited the psychic skills of his mother and grandmother, which in him have evolved to unparalleled heights of parapsychological power. He is a Necroscope: he talks to the dead like other men talk to their friends and neighbours. And indeed the teeming dead are Harry's friends, for he is the one light in their eternal darkness, their only contact with the world they have left behind.
For the common perception of death is incorrect: the minds of the dead do not accompany their bodies into corruption and dust but go on to explore the myriad possibilities of their leanings which were unattainable in life. The writers continue to 'write' great works that can never be published; the architects design fabulous, near-perfect cities which will never be built; the mathematicians explore Pure Number to exponentials whose only boundary is infinity.
As a boy Harry utilized his esoteric 'talent' to help with his studies; since he himself did not appear academically inclined, certain of his deceased specialist friends were able to show him the short cuts around otherwise impossible classroom problems. As a result of which he discovered his own affinity for instinctive or intuitive maths.
Harry Keogh was not the only one who 'talked' to the dead. In the USSR the Soviet E-Branch (ESP-Branch) made use of Boris Dragosani, a necromancer, to tear the secrets of corpses from their violated bodies. But where Harry was beloved of the Great Majority, they feared and loathed Dragosani. The difference was this: where the Necroscope merely conversed with the dead, befriending and consoling them, and asking nothing in return, the Russian necromancer simply reached in and took\ Having been instructed in his obscene talent by a long-buried but still undead vampire, whose seed had been passed on to him, nothing could be hidden from Dragosani: he would find his answers in the blood, the guts, the very marrow of his victims' bones. In all other instances the dead can't feel pain - but that was part of Dragosani's talent, too. For when he worked he made them feel it! They felt his hands, his knives, his tearing nails; they knew and felt everything he did to them! It was never his way simply to question the dead for their secrets, for then they might lie to him. No, his way was to rend them apart and then read the answers in torn skin and muscle, in shredded ligaments and tendons, in brain fluid and the mucus of eye and ear, and in the very texture of the dead tissue itself!
. . . While avenging the cruel death of his murdered mother, Harry Keogh became aware of the existence of the ESP-agencies of East and West. Recruited to the aid of British ESP-Intelligence in the secret war with Russia's mindspies, he pitted himself against Boris Dragosani. And now his intuitive maths came into play.
With the assistance of August Ferdinand Möbius (1790-1868) Harry gained access to the Möbius Continuum, a fifth dimension running parallel not only to the mundane four but to all other material planes. He could now in effect 'teleport' instantly to anywhere in the world, just as long as he had the mathematical co-ordinates or a dead friend in that location to act as a beacon. In addition, he had discovered his terrible power to call up the dead from their graves!
To rid the world of the vampire Dragosani, Harry used the Möbius Continuum to invade the Chateau Bronnitsy, Russia's secluded E-Branch HQ. There he called up from death an army of mummified Tartars whose bodies had been preserved by the peaty ground. Dragosani was destroyed, and along with him many of the staff and much of the apparatus of the Soviet mindspy agency.
But Harry paid the price too, and his body was also destroyed. Except . . .
... As the Necroscope knew well enough from personal experience, death is not the end.
Incorporeal, pure mind, he escaped to the Möbius Continuum and later, by involuntary metempsychosis, came to 'inhabit' the brain-dead body of a British esper. By then, however, Harry had also come to realize the role he must play in the eradication of vampire spawn from the world of men. This recognition of his purpose (his destiny?) came about through the discovery of a vampire's scarlet thread among the pure blue life-threads of humanity where they permeate the past and future time-lanes of the Möbius Continuum.
Yulian Bodescu, contaminated with vampirism by Thibor Ferenczy - the same centuries-dead vampire who infected Dragosani - threatened both Harry's life and the life of his baby son. But this time it was Harry Jr who turned the tables and made possible Bodescu's destruction; for he too was born a Necroscope, with talents the same as (or greater than?) those possessed by his father.
Following the Bodescu affair, Harry Jr vanished (apparently from the face of the Earth) and took his poor demented mother with him. Harry Sr, searching far and wide for his wife and infant son, despaired of ever finding them: in the Möbius Continuum their life-threads disappeared mysteriously into some otherworldly place where even he could not follow.
Harry quit British E-Branch and devoted himself to his search, which soon became an obsession. Years passed and the Necroscope turned recluse, living in a rambling, ramshackle house some miles outside Edinburgh.
Then . . . E-Branch contacted him again. They were badly in need of Harry's help and guessed he'd be reluctant, but there was also a carrot. The Branch had a similar case on its hands: a Secret Service agent had gone missing, not presumed dead. Just like Harry Jr and his mother, so now a young spy had disappeared into thin air. The mindspies had reason to believe he was alive, but still they couldn't find him. Harry checked it out with the Great Majority, who denied that the missing man had joined their ranks. And yet E-Branch swore that he wasn't 'here' on Earth. So ... where was he?
Could it be he was in the same place as the Necroscope's wife and child?
Eventually Harry's inquiries led him to the Perchorsk Projekt, a Russian experiment buried deep in a ravine under the Ural Mountains. In an attempt to create a force-field barrier as a counter to the USA's Star Wars scenario, the Soviets had accidentally blasted a 'wormhole' out of this space-time dimension into a parallel plane of existence. And in so doing they had also discovered the ancient source of all vampiric infestation of Earth! Things were coming through the Perchorsk Gate into our world. Unbelievable things - unbelievable except to the Necroscope and certain members of the British and Soviet E-Branches.
Through his contacts with the dead, and especially with the assistance of August Ferdinand Möbius, Harry discovered a second Gate and used it to venture into the world of the Wamphyri, whose skyscraper aeries gloomed gaunt and nightmarish over all Starside, the world where the vampire Lords held sway. There he discovered his son, grown now to a young man, but, alas, infected with vampirism!
Known as The Dweller in this weird parallel world, Harry Jr had so far managed to hold his vampire metamorphosis in check; he commanded a small band of Travellers (the original Gypsies), and a regiment of 'trogs', the aboriginal men of Starside. But his enemies were monstrous and far outnumbered him. Only his 'magic' - his mastery of the Möbius Continuum, and of superior science - had so far kept him safe. But under the guidance of the great and sinister Lord Shaithis, the warlike Wamphyri had recently put aside all personal grievances and banded together into an awesome, alien army. Jealous of The Dweller, his garden and works, they would move in unison against him.
The two Harrys must stand alone against this force of monsters, else total Wamphyri domination of Star- and Sunside would become a grim and horrific reality. But they did not stand entirely alone; in the bloody battle for The Dweller's garden, the Lady Karen joined sides with them. A vampire, indeed Wamphyri, Karen was as beautiful as she was clever. She could read the minds of the vampire Lords and forecast their every move. Still Shaithis and his fellow Lords, their lieutenants, and all the vast and terrible warrior-creatures they had created from the flesh of men and trogs alike must surely have won the battle . . . had it not been for the awesome powers of the Necroscope and his son.
Using the raw light of the sun itself, the garden's defenders defeated Shaithis's vampire army, and went on to level the towering stacks of stone and bone which were the aeries of the Wamphyri. All except Karen's, who had been their ally . . .
Afterwards, Harry Keogh visited Karen in the grimly forbidding aerie which was her place. She was not long a vampire; the thing within her had not yet gained full ascendancy; if the Necroscope could drive out her vampire and destroy it ... perhaps there was yet a chance for Harry Jr.
Harry's method was crude, cruel, even brutal - but hideously effective. Except . . . how could he have foreseen the consequences? Karen had been Wamphyri! And now? Without her vampire she was nothing but a pretty, empty girl. Where was her power, her freedom, her raw, unfettered Wamphyri spirit now? Gone.
And when Harry awoke from his exhaustion, gone too was Karen!
From on high he saw her body wrapped in the white sheath she wore for a gown, bloody and broken on the flanks of her aerie, where she had thrown herself down from the uppermost levels.
The Dweller saw what his father had done, and knew why. If Harry Sr had found a cure for Karen, he might well have applied the principle to Harry Jr, too. Fearing that one day his father might return to Starside with just such a 'cure', The Dweller used his superior vampire powers to reduce Harry's skills to nothing. He took away his deadspeak (his ability to talk to the dead) and also his numeracy. And then he returned Harry Keogh, ex-Necroscope, to his own world, the world of men . . .
Forbidden to speak to the dead - a rule he must obey or else suffer terrible mental and physical agony - and denied the use of the Möbius Continuum as a result of his enforced innumeracy, Harry Keogh was as close as he had ever been to being a 'normal' man. Which, after what he had known, equated almost to a prefrontal lobotomy. He had been the Necroscope - and was now powerless.
But although incapable of conscious communication with the teeming dead, still they could speak to him in his dreams. And their message was monstrous. Another Great Vampire had come to stalk the world!
Harry had dedicated himself to the eradication of vampirism; but what could he, ex-Necroscope, do now? As the world's foremost expert on vampires, he could at least advise. He must do something, for unless he and E-Branch found the vampire first, then sooner or later the undead monster would surely find him! For Harry had grown into a legend: he was the vampire-slayer, and locked in his 'crippled' mind were all the secrets of the Great Majority and mathematical formulae governing the Möbius Continuum itself. If the born-again monster should use its necromancy to steal his forbidden metaphysical talents . . . the result would be unthinkable!
The dead, forbidden to talk to Harry except in his dreams, rallied to him. They used other methods to get their messages across: to tell him that a vampire was at work in the islands of the Aegean. Once more in league with E-Branch, Harry Keogh and the girl who loved him went out to the Mediterranean to see what could be done.
But two British espers had already been vampirized and their esoteric talents added to those of Janos Ferenczy, the bloodson of Faéthor and 'brother' to Thibor, the old Thing In The Ground. Janos was back to reclaim his territories and dig up again certain antique treasure-hoards which he himself had long ago buried as a safeguard against the changes which centuries of immobility in undeath would bring, treasures which would lie lost in the earth until his planned 'resurrection'. These preparations had been made back in the fifteenth century, when Janos had known that his powerful vampire father, Faéthor, was returning again to Wallachia after almost three hundred years of bloodthirsty adventuring with the Crusaders, then with Genghis Khan, and finally with the Moslems. For Faéthor hated Janos and would try to 'kill' him (as he had already put down his brother, Thibor, undead into the earth), for which reason Janos had made these provisions against an uncertain future.
When Harry saw what he was up against with Janos, and after the vampire had taken Harry's woman for his own, then he knew he must somehow regain his dead-speak and his command over the mysterious Möbius Continuum. Without these powers ... he just wouldn't stand a chance.
The ghost of Faéthor Ferenczy, whose place was the crumbling, deserted, overgrown ruins of a house close to Ploiesti in Romania, contacted Harry and offered to help. The damage done to Harry's mind was the work of The Dweller, Harry Jr, a vampire with hugely enhanced mentalist powers. If Harry would now allow Faéthor's spirit into his mind, perhaps that 'father' of vampires could remove the blockage and unlock the closed-off regions. Harry did not like the idea (to allow a vampire, this vampire, into his mind?) and knew it was an experiment fraught with the most terrifying dangers. But beggars can't be choosers.
As to why Faéthor should want to help: he could not bear the thought of his bloodson, Janos, up and about in the world while he was nothing but a fading memory, shunned even by the dead. He wanted Janos put down again, indeed he actively desired to be the instrument of that termination. And Harry Keogh was the only one who could do it. At least, this was the explanation which Faéthor offered to Harry . . .
In Romania, Harry slept overnight in the ruins of Faéthor's last refuge, and while he slept the father of vampires entered his mind and reopened certain mental 'doors' which Harry Jr had closed there. Waking up, Harry discovered his deadspeak returned to him. Now he could contact the long-dead mathematician Möbius and have him enter his mind and, he hoped, give him back his numeracy and mastery of the so-called Möbius Continuum. But Faéthor had lied: once inside Harry's mind the vampire would not leave it - the Necroscope now had an unwelcome tenant.
Finally, at Janos's castle in the Zarandului Mountains of Transylvania, Harry recovered his powers in full, returned Janos to dust and committed the spirit of Faéthor to an eternity of emptiness and utter loneliness in the infinite future time-streams of the Möbius Continuum.
But his victory was not without cost.
Strange urges are part of Harry now, and stranger hungers. His life-thread unwinds as before into the unending future of Möbius time. Except . . . where once that life-thread was pure blue, as are the threads of all entirely human beings, now it is tinged with red!
'Harry.' Darcy Clarke's voice was twitchy on the 'phone, but he was trying hard to control it. 'There's a problem we could use some help with. Your kind of help.'
Harry Keogh, Necroscope, might or might not know what was bothering the head of British E-Branch, and it might or might not have to do with him directly. 'What is it, Darcy?' he said, speaking softly.
'It's murder,' the other answered, and now his twitchi-ness came on strong, shaking his voice. 'It's bloody awful murder, Harry! My God, I never saw anything like it!'
Darcy Clarke had seen a lot in his time and Harry Keogh knew it, so that this was a statement he found hard to believe. Unless of course Clarke was talking about . . . 'My kind of help, you said?' Harry's attention was suddenly riveted to the 'phone. 'Darcy, are you trying to tell me - that - ?'
'What?' The other didn't understand him at first, but then he did. 'No, no - Christ, no - it's not the work of a vampire, Harry! But some kind of monster, certainly. Oh, human enough - but a monster, too.'
Harry relaxed a little, but a very little.
He'd been expecting a call from E-Branch sooner or later. This could be it: some sort of clever trap. Except . . . Darcy had always been his friend; Harry didn't think he would act on something - not even something like that - without checking it out every which way first. And even then Harry couldn't see Darcy coming after him with a crossbow and hardwood bolt, a machete, a can of petrol. No, he'd have to talk to him first, get Harry's side of it. But in the end . . .
. . . The head of the Branch knew almost as much about vampires as Harry did, now. And he'd know, too, that there was no hope. They'd been friends, fighting on the same side, so Harry guessed it wouldn't be Darcy's finger on the trigger. But someone's, certainly.
'Harry?' Clarke was anxious. 'Are you still there?'
'Where are you, Darcy?' Harry inquired.
The Military Police duties room, in the Castle,' the other answered at once. They found her body under the walls. Just a kid, Harry. Eighteen or nineteen. They don't even know who she is yet. That alone would be a big help. But to know who did it would be the biggest bonus of all.'
If there was one man Harry Keogh could trust, it had to be Darcy Clarke. 'Give me fifteen minutes,' he said, 'and I'll be there.'
Clarke sighed. Thanks, Harry. We'd appreciate it.'
'We?' Harry snapped. He couldn't keep the suspicion out of his voice.
'Eh?' Clarke sounded startled, taken aback. 'Why, the police. And me.'
Murder. The police. Not a Branch job at all. So what was Clarke doing on it - If it was real? 'How did you get roped in?'
And suddenly the other was . . . caught on the hop? Cagey, anyway. 'I ... I was up here on a "duty run", visiting an old Scottish auntie. Something I do once in a blue moon. She's been on her last legs for ten years now but won't lie down, keeps on tottering around! I was scheduled to go back down to HQ today, but then this came up. It's something the Branch has been trying to help the police with, a set of - God! - gruesome serial murders, Harry.'
An old Scottish auntie? It was the first time Harry had heard of Darcy's old auntie. On the other hand, this had to be a good opportunity to find out if they knew anything about . . . about his problem. Harry knew he would have to be careful: he knew too much about E-Branch just to go walking right into something. Yes, and they knew too much about him. But maybe they didn't know everything. Not yet, anyway.
'Harry?' Clarke's voice came back again, tinny and a little distorted; probably the wires swaying in the winds that invariably blew around the Castle's high walls. 'Where will I see you?'
'On the esplanade, at the top of the Royal Mile,' the Necroscope growled. 'And Darcy . . .'
'Yes?'
'. . . Nothing. We'll talk later.' He replaced the telephone in its cradle and went back to his breakfast in the kitchen: an inch-thick steak, raw and bloody!
To look at, Darcy Clarke was possibly the world's most nondescript man. Nature had made up for this physical anonymity, however, by giving him an almost unique talent. Clarke was a deflector: he was the opposite of accident-prone. Only let him get close to danger and something, some parapsychological guardian angel, would intervene on his behalf. Which meant that if all of Clarke's similarly ESP-talented team of psychics were photographs, he'd be the only negative. He had no control over the thing; he was aware of it only on those occasions when he stared deliberately in the face of danger.
The talents of the others - telepathy, scrying, foretelling, oneiromancy, lie-detecting - were more pliable, obedient, applicable: but not Clarke's. It just did its own thing, which was to look after him. It had no other use. But because it ensured his longevity, it made him the right man for the job. The anomaly was this: that he himself didn't quite believe in it until he felt it working. He still switched off the current before he'd even change a light-bulb! But maybe that was just another example of the thing at work.
To look at him then, no one would suppose that Clarke could ever be the boss of anything, let alone head of the most secret branch of the British Secret Services. Middle-height, mousy-haired, with something of a slight stoop and a small paunch, and middle-aged to boot, he was middling in just about every way. He had sort of neutral-hazel eyes in a face not much given to laughter, and an intense mouth which you might remember if you remembered nothing else, but other than that there was a general facelessness about him which made him instantly forgettable. The rest of him, including the way he dressed, was . . . medium.
These were Harry Keogh's perfectly mundane thoughts in the few seconds which ticked by after he stepped out of the metaphysical Möbius Continuum on to the esplanade of Edinburgh Castle, and saw Darcy Clarke standing there with his back to him, hands thrust deep in the pockets of his overcoat, reading the legend on a brass plaque above a seventeenth-century drinking trough.
The iron fountain, depicting two heads, one ugly and the other beatific, stood:
. . . Near the site on which
many witches were burned at the
stake. The wicked head and serene
head signify that some used exceptional
knowledge for evil purposes, while others
were misunderstood and wished their
kind nothing but good.
The bright May day would be warm but for the gusting wind; the esplanade was almost empty; two dozen or so tourists stood in small groups at the higher end of the broad, walled, tarmac plateau, looking down across the walls at the city, or taking photographs of the great grey fortress - the Castle on the Rock - behind its facade of battlements and courtyards. Harry had arrived in the moment after Clarke, vainly scanning the esplanade for some sign of him, had turned to the plaque.
A moment ago Clarke had been alone with his thoughts and no living person within fifty feet of him. But now a soft voice behind him said: 'Fire is an indiscriminate destroyer. Good or evil, everything burns when it's hot enough.'
Clarke's heart jumped into his throat. He gave a massive start and whirled about, the colour rushing from his face and leaving him pale in a moment. 'Ha-Ha-Harry!' he gasped. 'God, I didn't see you! Where did you spring - ?' But here he paused, for of course he knew where Harry had sprung from . . . because the Necroscope had taken him there once, into that every-where and -when place, that within and without, which was the Möbius Continuum.
Shaken, heart hammering, Clarke clutched at the wall for support. But it wasn't terror, just shock; his talent read no sinister purpose into Keogh's presence.
Harry smiled at him and nodded, touched his arm briefly, then looked at the plaque again. And his smile at once turned sour. 'Mainly they were exorcizing their own fears,' he said. 'For of course most if not all of these women were innocent. Indeed, we should all be so innocent.'
'Eh?' Clarke hadn't quite recovered his balance yet, wasn't focusing on Keogh's meaning. 'Innocent?' He too looked at the plaque.
'Completely,' Harry nodded again. 'Oh, they may have been talented in their way, but they were hardly evil.
Witchcraft? Why, today you'd probably try to recruit them into E-Branch!'
Suddenly, truth flooded in on Clarke and he knew he wasn't dreaming; no need to pinch himself and start awake; it was just this effect which Harry always had on him. Three weeks ago in the Greek islands (was that all it had been, three weeks?) it had been the same. Except at that time Harry had been near-impotent: he hadn't had his deadspeak. Then he'd got it back, and set out on his double mission: to destroy the vampire Janos Ferenczy and regain his mastery of -
Clarke snatched a breath. 'You got it back!' He grabbed Harry's arm. The Möbius Continuum!'
'You didn't get in touch with me,' Harry accused, albeit quietly, 'or you'd have known.'
'I got your letter,' Clarke quickly defended himself, 'and I tried a dozen times to get you on the 'phone. But if you were home you weren't answering. Our locators couldn't find you . . .' He threw up his hands. 'Give me a chance, Harry! I've only been back from the Med a few days, and a pile of stuff to catch up with back here, too! But we'd finished the job in the islands, and we supposed you'd done the same at your end. Our espers were on it, of course; reports were coming in; Janos's place above Halmagiu, blown off the mountain like that. It could only be you. We knew you'd somehow won. But the Möbius Continuum too? Why, that's . . . wonderful! I'm delighted for you!'
Harry wondered: Oh, really? But out loud he only said: 'Thanks.'
'How in hell did you do that?' Clarke was still excited. If it was all a sham he was good at it. 'I mean, wreck the castle that way? If we've got it right it was devastating! Is that how Janos died, in the explosion?'
'Slow down,' Harry told him, taking his arm. 'We can talk while you take me to see this girl.'
The other's excitement quickly ebbed. 'Yes,' he nodded, his tone subdued now, 'and that's something else, too. You won't like it, Harry.'
'So what's new?' The Necroscope seemed as calm (resigned, soulful, sardonic?) as ever. And though he tried not to show it, Clarke suspected he was wary, too. 'Did you ever show me anything I did like?'
But Clarke had an answer to that one. 'If everything was the way we'd like it, Harry,' he said, 'then we'd all be out of work. Me, I'd gladly retire tomorrow. I keep threatening to. But when I see something like . . . like I'm going to show you, then I know that someone has to do it.'
As they started up the esplanade, Harry said: 'Now this is a castle!' His voice was more animated now. 'But as for the Castle Ferenczy: that was a heap long before I got started on it. You asked how I did it?'
He sighed, then continued: 'A long time ago, toward the end of the Bodescu affair, I learned about an ammo and explosives dump in Kolomyya and used stuff from there to blow up the Chateau Bronnitsy. Well, since the easy way is often the best way, I did it again. I made two or three trips, Möbius trips, and put enough plastic explosive into the foundations of Janos's place to blow it to hell! I'm not even going to guess what was in the guts of that place, but I'm sure there was - stuff- there which even I didn't see and still don't want to. You know, Darcy, even a finger-end of Semtex will blow bricks right out of a wall? So you can imagine what a couple of hundredweight will do. If there was anything there that we might call "alive",' he shrugged and shook his head, 'it wasn't when I'd finished.'
While Harry talked, the head of E-Branch studied him. But not so intently that he would notice. He seemed exactly the same man Clarke had come to Edinburgh to see just a month ago, a visit which had ended for Clarke in Rhodes and the islands of the Dodecanese, and for Harry in the mountains of Transylvania. He seemed the same, but was he? For the fact was, Darcy Clarke knew someone who said he wasn't.
Harry Keogh was a composite. He was two men: the mind of one and the body of another. The mind was Keogh and the body was ... it had once been Alec Kyle. And Clarke had known Kyle, too, in his time. The strangest thing was this: that as time progressed, so the Kyle face and form got to look more like the old Harry, whose body was dead. But that was something which always made Clarke's brain spin. He skipped it, put the metaphysical right out of his mind and studied the purely physical.
The Necroscope was perhaps forty-three or forty-four but looked five years younger. But of course that was only the body; the mind was five years younger again. Even thinking about someone like Harry Keogh was a weird business. And again Clarke forced himself to concentrate on the physical.
Harry's eyes were honey-brown, occasionally defensive and frequently puppy-soulful - or would be if one could see under those wedge-sided sunglasses he was wearing in the shade of his broad-brimmed 1930s hat. If there was one thing in all the world Clarke hated to see, it had to be Harry wearing those dark-lensed glasses and that hat. Anyone else, no problem. But not Harry, and not now. Especially the sunglasses. They were something Clarke had told himself to look out for; for while it was a common enough thing to wear such in the Greek islands in late April or early May, it was quite another to see them in Edinburgh at that time of year. Unless someone had weak eyes. Or different eyes . . .
Grey streaks, so evenly spaced as to seem deliberately designed or affected, were plentiful in Harry's russet-brown, naturally wavy hair. In a few years the grey could easily take over; even now it lent him a certain erudition, gave him the look of a scholar. A scholar, yes, but in what fabulous subjects? But in fact Keogh hadn't been like that at all. Hadn't used to be. What, Harry, a black magician? A warlock? Lord, no!
. . . Just a Necroscope: a man who talked to dead people.
Keogh's body had been well-fleshed, maybe even a little overweight, once. With his height, however, that ought not to have mattered a great deal. But it had mattered to Harry. After that business at the Chateau Bronnitsy - his metempsychosis - he'd trained his new body down, brought it to a peak of perfection. Or at least done what he could with it, considering its age. That's why it looked only thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old.
And inside Harry's body and behind his face, an innocent. Or someone who had used to be innocent. He hadn't asked to be the way he was, hadn't wanted to become E-Branch's most powerful weapon and do the things he'd done. But he'd been what he was and the rest had come as a matter of course. And now? Was he still an innocent? Did he still have the soul of a child? Did he have any soul at all? Or did something else have him?
Now the pair had passed under the archway of the military guardroom, where several police officers had been interviewing a group of uniformed soldiers, into the cobbled gantlet which was the approach alley to the Castle proper. All of the officers in the guardroom seemed aware that Clarke was 'something big'; Harry and he weren't challenged; suddenly the bulk of the Castle loomed before them.
And now Darcy said: 'So I don't need to do any tidying up? You left nothing undone, right?'
'Nothing,' Harry told him. 'What about Janos's set-up in the islands?'
'Gone!' said the other with finality. 'All of it. All of them. But I still have a few men out there - just looking -just to be on the safe side.'
Harry's face was pale and grim but he forced a strange, sad smile. 'That's right, Darcy,' he said. 'Always be on the safe side. Never take chances. Not with things like that.'
...
Januszek66