Paxton scowled and started to turn away, make tracks back up to the road. But Trask caught him by the arm and turned him around. 'Oh, and there's one other thing, Mr Hugely Talented Telepath. I've about ninety per cent had it with you trying to read my mind. When I'm a hundred per cent pissed you'll be the first to know it. Because after that Harry Keogh won't be the only one who ever tossed you in a river, right?'

Paxton was wise enough to say nothing. They returned to the road in silence, made their way to the old stone bridge over the river, and waited for Teale and Robinson to join them there...

Harry and Penny had finished their first coffees half an hour ago. Now they had seconds, which were going cold in their cups. Penny had tried a cream cake, too, from which she'd taken just one bite. She wasn't sure if it was the cake or her mood, but since nothing tasted right it was probably her mood. Every so often the Necroscope would reach into his inside pocket and take Johnny's hideous steel-tube weapon into the palm of his hand. Penny was aware each time he did it - aware that he was touching the instrument of her once-death - and she shuddered every time.

Finally, as Harry reached into his pocket yet again, she burst out: 'What if he doesn't stop? What if he drives clear down to London?'

Harry shrugged. 'If it looks like he will, then I'll let him get as ... far ... as ...' He came to a jerky halt as his fingers touched the awful knife, and briefly closed his eyes behind their dark lenses. When he opened them again his voice had turned cold and taken on a cutting edge. 'But it won't come to that. He has stopped, now!'

'Do you know where?' She clutched his hand.

He shook his head. 'No. The only way to find out is to go there and see.'

'Oh my God!' she whispered. 'I'm going to see the man who murdered me!'

'More importantly,' Harry told her, 'he's going to see you. And he's going to wonder about you. If he reads the newspapers he'll know that Penny, one of the girls he killed, had a look-alike called, by some peculiar coincidence, Penny! But he'll have a hard time believing he's actually happened across her. I mean, there are coincidences and coincidences. If he has any brain at all, he'll find it a damned suspicious thing. It will worry him. That's what I want to do: worry him. I think Johnny deserves something of a harrowing time before we even-up the score more permanently.'

'We?' she repeated him. 'It... it feels like you're using me, Harry.'

'I suppose I am,' he answered her, allowing her to lead him out of the cafeteria into the night. 'Though not as hard as he did.' He quickly went on: 'And don't tell me that's not fair. Fair is like beauty, it lies in the eyes of the beholder. Also, I'm not asking you to do much, just to be there. There's someone else with a much larger part to play.'

'Maybe you're right,' she said, as he folded her in his arms, conjured a door and carried her over the threshold into the Möbius Continuum. About what's fair and what's beautiful, I mean. And it's a fact, I don't think there was anything of beauty in Johnny.

No, Harry answered, grimly, and nothing fair about him, either. But me, I'm fair. I only take an eye for an eye...

7

Nightmare Junction

Johnny had stopped at an all-services motorway watering-hole north of Newark. He'd chosen the A1(T) rather than the larger Ml because its service stations usually had richer pickings: not only long-distance truckers and motorists used its facilities but locals, too. It was Johnny's experience that when the town and village dance halls slowed down around midnight the young ones headed this way for a cheap motorway meal after a hard night's drinking, dancing and whatever. He'd stopped here before, but no luck as yet. Maybe tonight.

On clutch and air-brakes, he'd snorted and whoofed the big articulated truck around the tarmac until he'd found a place to park it where its nose sniffed the exit route. It was as well to be able to drive out of such places with as little trouble as possible. The place was on a major junction; the car park was busy and the lorry park half-empty; people came and went in small parties to and from the brightly-lit diner. Johnny's would be just one more face over a plate of chicken and chips and a pint of alcohol-free.

Inside, there'd been nothing much of a queue at the self-service bar; in a little while Johnny had settled at a table in a corner booth where he'd toyed with his food and casually looked the place over for a likely female face. There were several, but... they didn't fit his bill: too old, too drab, slack-faced, sharp-eyed, accompanied, or stone-cold sober. A few bright-eyed young things, yes, but all hanging on to flash boyfriends. Well, that's how it went. But there were plenty more places just like this between here and London. And you never could tell when your luck was going to change.

He remembered a time when, on a lonely stretch of road, this bird had roared by in a little red sports job. He'd bombed after her and forced her off the road into a ditch, then told her he was sorry and it was an accident -but he would be glad to give her a lift to the nearest I garage. Oh, he'd given her a lift, all right, but not to a garage. And then it had been her turn to give him a lift, a really good one, a real high. Johnny had been in a weird mood that night: after killing her he'd chopped a channel up under her jaw and fucked her in the throat. She'd felt it, of course, and how the dead bitch had yelped! Oh, she'd had cock in her throat before, but not coming from that direction.

Thinking about it had got him worked up. He must have one tonight. But not from this place. Maybe he should move on.

And that was when he saw ... he saw... what the shit?

It wasn't possible but ... he had to fight with his eyes to keep them from looking in her direction again. She was just over there; she'd just slid her backside on to a seat in a booth close by; there was a blind guy there, too - or a guy in dark glasses, anyway - but he didn't seem to be with her. She had a coffee, just a coffee, and she was the same as last time. She was exactly the same. And for a moment Johnny's mind whirled, for he could swear he'd had this one before!

How can that be? he asked himself. How can it be? And the answer was simple: it couldn't be. Unless this girl was the other's twin sister ... or her double.'

And then he remembered reading something about that in the papers: how they thought the one he'd had in Edinburgh - Penny, that was her name - was someone else. But then she'd turned up alive: the spitting image of the one he'd screwed, murdered, and screwed again. Stranger still, the one who'd turned up had also been called Penny. Coincidence? Jesus, coincidence! But the biggest coincidence of them all: here she was, right now, right here. That is, unless he'd started seeing fucking things.

Slowly Johnny looked up from his food, through the acid-etched, fern-patterned glass dividers which loaned the booths a little privacy, until her face was directly in his line of vision. Maybe for a moment he caught her eye, but just for a moment, and then she looked away. The half-blind guy - the guy with the eye problem, anyway, who shared her booth - had his back to Johnny; but he didn't look much anyway, slumped over his mug of coffee like that. Her father, maybe?

No, her lover, Harry Keogh answered, but silently, speaking only to himself. Her vampire lover, you scumbag.

He had been into Pound's mind from the moment he and Penny had entered the place, and the mental cesspool in there was as rank as anything he'd ever come up against. Together with the necromancer's recognition of Penny as a former victim, or that victim's double, it strengthened Harry's resolve, confirmed his commitment. But as yet Pound's recognition of her hadn't produced the reaction Harry had expected. Curiosity, yes, but not fear. In a way, perhaps that was understandable.