Harry couldn't know it but he wasn't going to have a good night. Asleep almost before his head hit the pillows, he was at once assailed by strange dreams: 'real' dreams in the main, but vague and shadowy things which he probably wouldn't remember in the waking world.
Ever since his Necroscope talents had developed as a child, Harry had known two sorts of dreams. 'Real' dreams, the subconscious reshuffling of events and memories from the waking world, which anyone might experience, and metaphysical 'messages' in the form of warnings, omens and occasionally visions or glimpses of real events long since over and done with and others yet to come. The latter had presaged his developing dead-speak, enabling the dead in their graves to infiltrate his sleeping mind. He had learned to separate the two types, to know which ones were important and should be remembered, and which to discard as meaningless. Occasionally they would overlap, however, when a conversation with a dead friend might drift into a 'real' dream or nightmare - such as when his Ma had become a shrieking vampire! Or it might just as easily work the other way, when a troubled dream would be soothed by the intervention of a dead friend.
Tonight he would experience both types separate and intermingled, and all of them nightmarish.
They started innocuously enough, but as the night progressed so he began to feel a certain mental oppression. If anyone had shared his room, they would have seen him tossing and turning as the weird clearing-house of his mind set up a series of strange scenarios.
Eventually Harry's struggles wearied him and he drifted more deeply into dreams, and as was often the case soon found himself in a benighted graveyard. This was not in itself ominous: he need only declare himself and he knew he'd find friends here. Contrary as dreams are, however, he made no effort to identify himself but instead wandered among the weed-grown plots and leaning headstones, all silvered under the moon.
There was a ground mist which lapped at the humped roots of stunted trees and turned the well-trodden, compacted paths between plots to writhing ribbons of milk. Harry picked his way silently beneath the lunar lamp, and the mist curled almost tangibly about his ankles.
Then... suddenly he knew he was not alone in this place, and he sensed such a coldness and a silent horror as he'd never before known in any cemetery. He held his breath and listened, but even the beat of his own heart seemed stilled in this now terrible place. And in the next moment he knew why it was terrible. It wasn't just the preternatural cold and the silence, but the nature of the silence.
The dead themselves were silent... they lay petrified in their graves, in terror of something which had come among them. But what?
Harry wanted to flee the place, felt an unaccustomed urge to distance himself from what should be (to him) a sure haven in an uncertain dream landscape; but at the same time he was drawn towards a mist-shrouded corner of the graveyard, where rubbery vegetation grew green and lush and damp from the coiling vapours.
The vapours of the tomb, he thought, like the cold breath of the dead, leaking upwards from all of these graves! It was an unusual thought, for Harry knew that there was no life in death... was there?
No, of course not, for the two conditions of Man were quite separate: the living and the dead, distinct from each other as the two faces of a fathomless gorge, and Harry the only living person with the power to bridge the gap.
Oh? And what of the undead?
Something squelched underfoot with a sound like bursting bladders of seaweed, and Harry looked down. He stood at the very rim of the rank vegetation, beyond which unnatural mists boiled upwards presumably from some untended tomb. And at his feet ... a cluster of small black mushrooms or puffballs, releasing their scarlet spores even as he stepped amongst them.
Whose grave was it, he wondered, out of which these fungi siphoned their putrid nourishment? He passed in through a curtain of damp, clinging green, where heavy leaves and clutching creepers seemed reluctant to admit him; but emerging from the other side ... it was as if he'd passed into an entirely different region!
No mausoleum here. No leaning, lichened tombstones or weedy plots but ... a morass?
A swamp, yes. Harry stood on the rim of a vast, misted expanse of quag, rotting trees and rank vines; and all around, wherever there was semi-solid ground, the wrinkled black toadstools grew in diseased, ugly clumps, releasing their drifting red spores.
He moved to turn, retreat, retrace his steps, only to discover himself rooted to the spot, fascinated by a sudden commotion in the leprous grey mire. Directly to the fore, the quag was shuddering, forming slow doughy ripples as if something huge stirred just below the surface, causing vile black bubbles to rise and belch and release their gases.
And in another moment, up from the depths of the bog rose ... the steaming slab of a headstone, complete with its own rectangular plot of hideously quaking earth!
Until now, however unquiet, Harry's dream had been languid as a strange slow-motion ballet - but the rest of it came with nerve-shattering speed and ferocity.
Longing to turn and run but still rooted there, he could only watch as the mush of the bog slopped from the thrusting headstone and dripped from the rim of the risen tomb to reveal its true nature... indeed to reveal the identity of its dweller! The legend carved in the slab where the oozing quag gurgled from its grooves was hardly unfamiliar. It said, quite simply:
HARRY KEOGH: NECROSCOPE
Then-
The mound of the burial plot burst open, hurling great clods of earth in all directions! And lying there in that open grave, like some morbid parasite in a wound, a semblance or grotesque caricature of Harry himself... but festooned in all its parts with ripening, spore-bearing mushrooms!
Harry tried to scream and had no mouth; his likeness did the job for him; with a monstrous grunt it sat up in its gaping tomb, opened its yellow, pus-filled eyes, and screamed until it rotted down into a gurgling black stump!
Harry put up a hand before his eyes to ward off the sight of the thing... and his hand was covered with black nodules, like monstrous melanomas, growing and sprouting from his flesh even as he stared aghast! And now he saw why he couldn't run: because he was rooted to the spot, was himself a hybrid fungus thing, whose tendril toes had hooked themselves into the bank of rotting soil above the quivering swamp!
He turned up his face to the moon and screamed then, not with his puffball-spewing mouth but with his mind:
Christ! Oh, Christ! Oh, Christ! And before the dry-rot fungus webbing crawled over his eyes to seal them, too, he saw that in fact the moon was a skull which laughed at him from a sky of blood! But before the sky could rain its red on him, the moon-skull reached down skeletal arms to gather him up, draw him from the sucking swamp and refashion his limbs back into a man-shape. And:
Haarrry! the moon sang to him with Sandra's voice. Harry! Oh, why don't you answer me?
The old dream receded apace with the new one's advance. Harry tossed in his bed and sweated, and sent out tremulous deadspeak thoughts into the dark of the night. But:
No, no, Harry, came Sandra's urgent mental voice again. / don't need that for I'm not dead. Better if I were, perhaps, but I'm not. And only look at me now, Harry, only look at me now!
He forced open his squeezed-shut eyes and looked, and tried to accept the strangeness of what he saw.
The scene itself was weird and Gothic, and yet Harry knew the people in it well enough. Sandra, striding to and fro, to and fro, wringing her hands and tearing her hair; and Ken Layard, hunched over a wooden table, strangely slumped and crooked where he crushed his head between taloned hands and gazed feverishly on the unguessed caverns of his own mind. Sandra the telepath, and Layard the locator. Janos's creatures now.