Necroscope 9: The Lost Years by Brian Lumley Read Free Book Online

now, but as for defenceless.
    Harry Jr was an angel - but one who had come face to face with the devil, and won! Him and his father both. But that had been only one batle; the greater, bloodier wars were still to come. Right now neither one of them knew that, however, which was just as wel. Were it otherwise, they might not want to go on. The future has good cause to guard its secrets …
    But as his father was more than just any man, so Harry Jr was more than just any baby. It was when he was being … wel, the other thing -when his expression was other than a baby’s, and his thoughts more
    Necroscope: The Lost Years - Vol. I
    Brian Lumley
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    29
     
    than the groping, fuddled demands or inquiries of an inchoate mind in an untrained body - that the espers of E-Branch were especially interested in him. It was when they felt, sensed, experienced the awesome, alien power washing out from him as he experimented, or did whatever it was he did, that they knew for sure he wasn’t merely a baby. And when those baby-blue eyes of his lit with a faraway expression seen previously only in his father’s eyes, and they knew that he conversed with a teeming majority no one else but he and Harry Keogh could hear and talk to …
    Getting up mornings, the Necroscope would think of these things and, like Brenda, remember when it had been very different; when the world was a different place and he’d been a different person. It was easy to remember, for in his dreams he was still that other person. Hell, he was that person, even when he was awake! But only on the inside; which is to say, inside his head. For outside - in Harry’s body and face and entire external appearance, and especially in the mirror - he was someone else. A man called Alec Kyle. Which took some getting used to.
    That was probably why he clung so tightly to his dreams and was reluctant to let them go: because they were a form of wish-fulfilment, a place and a time when the world was a different world and the Necroscope a different person; himself.
    This morning was the same, or should be …
    For some, especially the young, waking up to a new day is a renewal, like being born all over again: the first day of the rest of their lives. Despite that Harry seemed to have done an awful lot of living, he was still very young: twenty-one years old. But his body - or Alec Kyle’s body - was ten years older. And knowing that this was what he must always wake up to, Harry really didn’t want to. It wasn’t that he was suicidal about it; the fact that he now inhabited an older and alien body scarcely made him long for death, (not the Necroscope Harry Keogh, a man who’d had it from the horse’s mouth more than once what it actually felt like to be dead, who knew what it really meant to be incorporeal!) It merely made him reluctant toward life, made it safer to be asleep and dreaming—
    —Well, sometimes. It depended on what you were dreaming about.
    Currently he was given to dream a recurrent theme of life (but his life, before al this) where, like the proverbial drowning man, he clung to the straws of his past existence only to feel them grow waterlogged and slip one by one from his straining fingers. Each straw was a scene from the times he had known and the life he had lived, the chronological story of his oh-so-strange adventures. So that like a drowning man facing his imminent, inescapable death, the dream-drowning Necroscope saw it all skipping before his eyes like a scratched, comically accelerated, badly edited monochrome film.
    His childhood in Harden, on the northeast coast of England, where he had attended primary and secondary schools with the roughneck colliery kids; his retreat from the mundane world of the living into the minds and ‘lives’ of the Great Majority; his secret being discovered by Sir Keenan Gormley, then Head of E-Branch, and his subsequent return to
    ‘the real world’ … his acceptance of his condition, the fact of his unique talent, and