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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
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Brian Lumley - Necroscope 5 - Deadspeak 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?'
'Soon,' he told her.
'We can't stay here? I know that place is bound to frighten me.'
'Do my eyes frighten you?' They were like small lamps in his face.
She smiled. 'No, because I know they're your eyes.'
'But they frighten others.'
'Because they don't know you.'
'On Starside I'll build an aerie,' Harry told her, 'where your eyes will be as
red as mine.'
'Will they?' She seemed almost eager.
'Oh, yes!' Harry told her. And to himself:
You may be sure of it, you poor darling child.
For even here and now, as early and unanticipated as this, he could detect the
faintest scarlet flush in them . . .
While she slept in his arms, Harry sat and made plans. They weren't much, just
something to do. They kept him from thinking too deeply about his and Penny's
imminent departure, its possible perils. About its inevitability.
For it was inevitable - as was the drone of the helicopter whose searchlights
came sweeping along the beach from the east. Harry had thought they'd be safe
here for ... oh, a long time. But as he reached out and touched the minds of
the people in the droning dragonfly airplane he saw that he'd been wrong. They
were espers.
The Branch,' he said, perhaps bitterly, waking Penny up and forming Mbius
equations in his mind.
'What, even here?' she mumbled, as he shifted her across the continent to a
clothing store in Sydney.
'Even here . . . there . . . yes,' he said. 'Indeed, anywhere. Their locators
will find me no matter where I go; they'll alert their contacts worldwide;
espers and bounty hunters will track and trap and eventually burn us. We can't
fight a whole world. And even if I could, I
don't want to. Because to fight is to surrender - to the thing inside me. And
I'd prefer to be just me. For as long as possible, anyway. But tonight we'll
lead them all a dance, right? For tomorrow we die.'
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'Die?'
'We'll be dead to this world, anyway,' he said.
They chose expensive clothes willynilly, and an expensive leather suitcase in
which to pack them. Then, as the store's alarms began to clamour, they moved
on.
It had been 9:00 p.m. local time when they left the beach; it was 11:30 in the
store they robbed; moving east they got dressed on another beach (Long Beach)
at 5 a.m. in the first light of dawn, and started a champagne breakfast in New
York a little after 8 a.m. - and all in the space of thirty or so minutes!
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Brian Lumley - Necroscope 5 - Deadspeak
Penny ate her steak barbecued, medium rare; Harry's was so rare it dripped
blood, just the way he'd ordered it. They drank three bottles of champagne.
When presented with the bill the Necroscope laughed, snatched Penny into his
lap, tilted his chair over backwards . . .
and the pair of them out of this world into the Mbius Continuum.
Minutes later (at 10:30 p.m. local time) and some three and a half thousand
miles north of where they'd started out, they robbed the innermost security
vaults of the Bank of Hong
Kong; and by midnight they'd lost a million Hong Kong Dollars on the gaming
tables in
Macau. A few minutes later (at 6:30 in the evening, local), still ordering and
drinking champagne, Harry bundled an entirely tipsy Penny into a hotel bed in
Nicosia, and left her there to sleep it off. She dripped pearls and diamonds
and her skin smelled of a fine haze of alcohol. Most women (were they
truthful) would give an entire world for the things she had seen and done and
experienced in the last half-day of her life on Earth. So had Penny given a
world. That's why Harry had arranged and executed it.
Their binge had taken a little over three hours: the locators at E-Branch HQ
in London -
and others in Moscow - were quite dizzy. But the Necroscope knew that Penny
was as yet too weak a source for them to track as a single entity. On her own,
they probably wouldn't be able to find her. Even if they could, he doubted if
they'd have a man in Cyprus. She'd be safe there. For a little while, anyway.
And now it was time he made their Starside reservations . . .
Part Four
1
Fathor - Zek Perchorsk
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Brian Lumley - Necroscope 5 - Deadspeak
In the Mbius Continuum, Harry opened a future-time door and went looking for
Fathor
Ferenczy. Fathor was long dead and gone, and had been incorporeal - which is
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zanotowane.pldoc.pisz.plpdf.pisz.plcs-sysunia.htw.pl
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