“Nothing is ‘going on’ with me!” Goodly’s normally piping voice rose higher still: a sign of his frustration, Trask knew. “It’s just that it’s like always: when you read the future you only very rarely see everything. The immediate future might be clearer—just a little clearer—but casting a week ahead is like driving through a thick fog. And a month is like being in a dark cave full of bats: now and then you’ll hear the flutter of wings, or maybe feel the air fan your cheek, but that’s it, that’s all. And then, when you do see something, you can never tell if it’s the before or the after, the cause or the effect. But in Scott St. John’s case there are a couple of things I do feel fairly certain about. First, that the horror I sensed was spawned in evil. Well, horror usually is, but there’s evil and there’s evil. And something else: St. John will fight the evil to the end and with everything he’s got—whatever that turns out to be. And finally . . .”
“Well?” Though puzzled and feeling angry and disappointed, still not knowing what to make of Goodly’s reticence, Trask was fascinated now. He wanted to know it all, but most of all whatever it was that the precog was still holding back . . . and why.
“Finally”—Goodly was on his feet, tall, thin, and pale—“finally, I know that St. John won’t be fighting this alone. There’ll be others helping him: a woman and—oh, I don’t know—someone else who I couldn’t see at all clearly. But I sensed that all three of them will be, well, talented . . .”
Finished, the precog eased his slender body back down into his chair. And after a long moment:
“Ah!” Trask said at last, believing he finally understood. “And St. John’s helpers? You wouldn’t be talking about yourself and Anna Marie English, by any chance?”
The precog shrugged his thin shoulders. “I can’t say that it will be us for sure, but if it is—”
“Then you were afraid that I’d say no, keeping you out of it for your health’s sake. Right?”
“No,” Goodly answered, very firmly. “Not at all. For if I saw Anna Marie English and myself—which isn’t at all certain—there’s no way you could keep us out of it because that’s not how it works. We can’t avoid the future, Ben. What will be will be, and according to certain modern theorists has already been! But on the other hand if it wasn’t us that I sensed, then fate will step in to divert us, stop us going down that route.”
“Oh, indeed!” Trask sat up straighter. “Absolutely! I can agree with you there because that sounds like fate in the shape of me!”
“But you won’t do that,” said the precog, hurriedly.
“And why not?”
“Because we’ll be fighting evil in a battle that could be of the greatest importance to . . . well, to everything! And anyway, you want to know what this is all about just as badly as I do.”
“Hmmm!” said Trask gruffly, chewing his lip. “What’s this, Ian, psychology? You’re not only my conscience now, but also my psychoanalyst? Well then, let me think it over. Hmm!”
And a moment later: “Okay, I’ve thought it over: go ahead, get on with it. But the moment you sense any kind of danger for you or Anna Marie—the moment you learn who or what this evil, this horror is—then you’ll get the hell out of it and report back to me, and we’ll turn E-Branch loose on it as a dedicated fighting unit with our gadgets and ghosts and all our resources primed for action. But I feel I should warn you now: working on what little we know—what little you know or have told me you know—I’m tempted to activate the entire Branch right now!”
“But you won’t,” said Goodly once again, shaking his head. “This is mainly St. John’s show, Ben. St. John and his helpers, who or whatever they are. Just the three of them.”
“The three of you, you mean!” said Trask, frowning again.
But the precog wouldn’t commit himself. Shrugging, he said, “Maybe, maybe not. I’ve told you all there is, Ben, all I know: that there’ll be three against an unknown, terrible threat. And the rest is . . . well, the rest is for the future.”
Goodly waited then, but when Trask just sat there, saying nothing more but simply staring at him, he left and closed the door quietly behind him . . .
As Goodly went looking for Anna Marie English in the Ops Room, the locator David Chung was on his way up in the elevator. And so the two men missed each other by just a few seconds.
Chung, a Cockney born and bred, was returning to E-Branch HQ after helping the Metropolitan Police in their search for a missing child, and his mood was very subdued. With his assistance, his special talent, they had found the girl in a shallow grave under shrubs in one of London’s parks. And the only good thing to come out of it: as soon as he’d seen her, touched her, then Chung had been able to lead the police to her murderer. A moment’s elation, but too many hours of black gloom, and weeks ahead that would be full of it.
Now in the corridor the locator’s steps suddenly faltered, slowed, brought him to a halt. He was alone yet seemed to sense a presence; there was an odd, indefinable quality to the air he breathed; he felt that he walked in the wake of a ghost, and he shivered. He looked back the way he’d come, then forward; there was no one else in the corridor, just the feeling that someone, something, had passed this way. But when, and who?
Chung’s eyes scanned long lines of doors on both sides of the corridor. Nothing strange in that; this was once the uppermost floor of a hotel, after all. And it still was, except that now it housed E-Branch. Behind those doors, Chung knew that his fellow agents were at work. But what else was at work here?
Then it dawned on him where he’d paused, and where he was standing: directly opposite a door with a nameplate that read:
And once more Chung shivered.
But already the feeling had passed, and he breathed freely again, straightened up and shrugged, and finally grinned at his own weird fancies, the product of a possibly overworked talent. For after all this was E-Branch, wasn’t it? And this was or had been Harry’s room. How could a man help feeling strange knowing that the Necroscope—the man who talked to the dead, who came and went like a ghost himself—had once stayed here? And Chung was well aware of the fact that residual psychic currents could last for a very long time.
Perhaps it were best he switched off for a while, gave his talent a well-earned rest, went and wrote up his report. And so he carried on to his own room, leaving Harry’s Room and a gradually fading something behind him . . .
5
Having sat alone in his office for some time really thinking it through, Trask believed he had arrived at a final understanding of Goodly’s reticence in respect of what now must be considered “the Scott St. John case.” For in the light of Goodly’s obvious and very real concerns, Trask knew it would be a dereliction of duty on his part not to follow it through, that he must now let Goodly and Anna Marie English carry out an investigation as per the scheme he’d okayed with the precog.
As to why Trask had been obliged to almost physically drag the entire thing—the fine details—out of Goodly: that was because he’d suspected that the precog wasn’t telling the whole truth. A partial truth isn’t a lie, it’s simply incomplete, and Goodly hadn’t wanted to alarm the Head of Branch by putting too much stress on the dangers he and the ecopath might be facing.
But Trask hadn’t been fooled by the other’s half-truth; he completely understood the precog’s difficulty in that respect—how he must feel torn between two agencies, two loyalties: that of his singular talent, his ability to read something of future events and then to act on his perceptions as best he could, and on the other hand his respect—an abiding and mutual respect—for the Head of Branch, Trask himself, his friend and colleague for many strange and dangerous years.
As for Trask’s abrupt, apparently snap decision to let the precog proceed as prescribed, however:
While it was almost impossible for anyone to lie to Trask, the man himself was not confined to the truth. He didn’t relish it, but when he felt justified and believed it was warranted he wasn’t averse
to telling the odd white lie, or in this case not telling all of the truth.
What? He should simply step aside, letting two of his most valued, uniquely talented agents, not to mention colleagues, go off into uncharted territory against horrors such as the precog had hinted at? Not likely! In his scrying on the future, Goodly had sensed the presence of two ESP-endowed people—presumably E-Branch agents—helping St. John. But what if there was to be a third and fourth that he hadn’t sensed and wouldn’t even know about?
Trask knew that sometimes it was prudent to have a watcher watching the watchers. Goodly wanted to use covert observation? Very well, Trask would have David Chung and a colleague perform a little discreet spying of their own—on Ian Goodly and Anna Marie English!
A stakeout, both mental and physical, on two top E-Branch agents, in order to ensure their safety; in Ben Trask’s opinion a sensible, logical precaution. Chung would watch Goodly’s back without the precog ever knowing it.
Trask called the Duty Officer and asked if David Chung was back from that job with the police. He was? Good! Then could he please report to Trask’s office in . . . say, half an hour?
And between times he would get back to reading through the remaining papers, reports, and requests on his desk, and see if they contained anything requiring the attention of E-Branch . . .
The half hour passed quickly enough, and saw Trask moving paper marked with a tick, a cross, or some curt comment—indicating variously yes, no, or maybe—from one side of his desk to the other, and from his In Tray to the Out or Action Tray. E-Branch got the weird stuff, the insoluble crimes and inexplicable occurrences that fell outside the expertise and experience of more orthodox security services, secret or otherwise, and Trask got to choose from these cases—these frauds, murders, disappearances, freakish incidents, atrocities, political scandals, and suspected acts of treachery and espionage—any that he might consider within the scope of E-Branch investigation.
This most recent crop of unresolved cases and requests was typical of the broad spectrum Trask had become used to, ranging from the murky and mundane to the eerie and exotic, the odd and obscure, and often the odious.
There was the case of Herr Ernst Stenger, a former leading light in East Germany’s now defunct Ministerium fur Staat Sicherheit—the Ministry for State Security, or simply “the Stasi”—who had gone missing from his base in Leipzig, suspected of absconding to Switzerland with the key to a bank vault containing a heap of Kremlin gold; treasure that he had been squirreling away over the course of two decades, allegedly on behalf of Stasi underlings: a terminal “golden handshake” between the old Soviet Union and her myriad East German spy minions.
In his absence, Herr Stenger stood accused of many brutalites, including torture, rape, and murder. He had also been in charge of an East Berlin Stasi cell controlling various German border police (Grenz Polizei, or GREPO) officers and units. In addition to the frequent and gratuitous killing of refugees by these border guards after the would-be escapees had scaled the Wall or Wire to the west—all on the orders of Stenger—it was also believed that he’d sent Stasi agents into West Berlin to eliminate members of Allied Military Intelligence, and that he had forged links with the IRA and other terrorist organizations in order to enable such operations.
Naturally MI5 and MI6 would be pleased to have words with Herr Stenger before certain Russian “authorities” (meaning the remaining diehard cells of a moribund KGB) or ex-Stasi “colleagues” caught up with him; wherefore it would be much appreciated if E-Branch was to discover his current whereabouts and inform the relevant agencies of the same . . .
Trask chewed his lip over this one, but not for long. Did anyone really believe he had the sort of manpower required for this kind of job—or the time? What, when Israel’s Mossad and a handful of other intelligence agencies worldwide were still searching for the last few war criminals from the Second World War? Hell no, it could take forever! He would post the details as restricted information, for E-Branch eyes only, on the slim chance that something would turn up . . . and leave it at that.
Trask scanned the next document, and sighed. A UFO sighting in Wales, coinciding with crop circles in Dorset: typical! While MI5 and the Metropolitan Police recognized E-Branch for its true worth, some educated loon in the Ministry of Agriculture and Fish was getting all steamed up about little green aliens scything cryptic designs, and leaving (probably) very rude messages in Old English cornfields!
Tearing the document in half, he dropped it into File 13: his waste-basket, for shredding.
Next up—
—Something strange and very unpleasant. And despite that Trask already had some knowledge of this case—but the barest of bare details (its bare bones?), which he’d read of in newspaper reports at least six months old now—this was the first time it had been brought to his attention in all its grotesque minutiae. He read it twice, slowly.
One of Her Majesty’s Government’s opposition ministers—Gregory Stamper, a very rich man with shares in several of the planet’s most profitable precious-metals mining concerns—had been found dead under what was euphemistically termed “odd and suspicious circumstances”: British phlegmatism, Trask supposed. But the forensic pathologist author of an accompanying medical report (someone who was himself quite obviously a pathological abecedarian) had gone one step farther and titled the thing:
A REPORT ON THE EVAGINATION OF
G. STAMPER:
An Operation of Incredible—Albeit
Criminal—Surgical Skill, Which Sight Unseen
I Would Have Pronounced a Medical Impossibility.
Evagination? Even knowing what it meant—at least being able to guess, from the pictures in the file—Trask typed it into his desk dictionary. And the answer came up:
“To evert: to remove from a sheath: to turn outside in.”
And he wondered, Is that different from inside out? How is it different? But in any case that was it: something he usually did with his socks first thing in the morning, so that he could pull them on more easily. He “evaginated” them, which wasn’t at all Trask being facetious . . . in fact it served to paint in his mind a clearer picture or understanding of the word; except, of course, that what he did to his socks didn’t damage them.
And reading the rest of the report, despite ignoring the many technical or medical words that failed to register, Trask found that that appeared to be precisely what this experienced criminal pathologist was suggesting: that while Stamper’s evagination was certainly the cause of death—because a man can’t live for long with his internal organs dangling on the outside—still there seemed to have been no actual damage to his soft tissue, his “sheath”?
It made very little sense; only the statement that “sight unseen I would have pronounced (this) a medical impossibility” made any sense at all!
Trask sat back in his chair, pulled at his chin, tried to think back, oh, how long—a thousand years?—to a time when his father had taken the ten-year-old Benjamin out to Malta in a last attempt to heal the rift with the boy’s Maltese mother. Sitting alone on the rocky rim of the sea in Valletta while his parents did whatever they were doing in a run-down fisherman’s cottage, listening to their shrill, angry voices and trying to shut them out, the boy had been mercifully abstracted from the argument when a sun-bronzed swimmer had come dripping from the sea with an octopus wrapped around each hand and wrist.
What had happened then . . . was that “evagination”? No, not at all, because there had been some damage to soft tissues when the swimmer / fisherman had used a knife to cut through a septumlike bridge in the body sacks of his catch to turn them—what? Outside in? No, they’d been turned inside out; and in any case, it would have been impossible to evaginate their tentacles. And why had the fisherman turned the creatures inside out? In order to tear off their now external organs. Trask remembered how the ink sacks had splattered black dye on the yellow rocks, and how a flock of screaming seagulls had rained from the sky, fighting
over eviscerated gills, heart, liver, and other bits floating on the water.
Evisceration then, in the case of the octopuses. But evagination? In poor Gregory Stamper’s case it could only have been; because as this long-winded forensic pathologist—the man who had done the postmortem—was careful to point out, there was no sign of any actual “surgery,” no cutting except his own upon Stamper’s hideous remains, which he had been obliged to perform in order to reverse as best as possible their unique condition and thus complete his examination . . .
For long minutes Trask stared at the photographs—
—And gave a massive start as a knock sounded on his door! This stuff he’d been reading had got to him; hardly surprising, really. Taking just a moment to compose himself, he called out, “Come in,” and David Chung entered with his report on the missing—now dead—girl. Speaking quickly, the locator summed it all up, then handed over his typed report.
“And you’re sure we got the right man, the right scumbag?” said Trask.
“Oh, yes,” Chung answered, with a deal of satisfaction. “He took a life and now he’ll be doing life. It’s all over for that bastard!”
“But not for you, eh?” said Trask, knowingly.
“I’ll get over it, sir,” the other answered as he made for the door. “Don’t we always?”
But Trask stopped him, saying, “David, give me a minute or two, will you? Please sit down.”
The locator turned and said, “No, it’s okay, really—I’m fine . . . sir?” But then, seeing the look on his boss’s face and realizing that Trask’s request wasn’t about him, he sat anyway.
And Trask told him, “Myself, I’m not at all okay or fine—far from it. But since you’ve already had your regulation sickener for the day, what’s there to spoil? So maybe I can ask you to share mine.” He pushed the disturbing monochrome photographs across the desk, and the locator’s almond eyes at once narrowed as he picked them up and looked at them.