'It's all in the mind. Willpower, I suppose…' Which was fair enough. What he did not say was that while it had certainly been his willpower, it had not entirely been his mind.
By the end of October Harry had let his Judo training fall off a little. His progress had been too rapid and his instructors at the club were growing wary of him. Anyway, he was satisfied that he could now look after himself perfectly well, even without 'Sergeant' Graham Lane's assistance. By that time, too, he had taken up ice skating, the final discipline in his itinerary.
Brenda, herself quite capable on the ice, was astonished. She had often tried to get Harry to accompany her to the ice rink in Durham, but he had always refused. That was hardly unnatural; she knew something of how his mother had died; it was just that she believed he should face up to his fear. She couldn't know that the fear wasn't entirely his but his mother's. In the end, though, Mary Keogh was made to see the sense in Harry's preparations and at last came gladly to his aid.
At first she was frightened — the ice, the memory, the sheer horror of her death lingered still — but in a very little while she was enjoying her skating again as much as
ever she had in life. She enjoyed through Harry, and in his turn he received the benefit of her instruction; so that soon he was able to lead Brenda a merry dance across the ice — much to her amazement!
'One thing I can definitely say about you, Harry Keogh,' she had breathlessly told him as he expertly waltzed her round and round the rink while their breath plumed fantastically in the cold air, 'is that there's never a dull moment! Why, you're an athlete!'
And at that moment it had dawned on Harry that he really could be — if there weren't other matters more pressing.
But then, in the first week in November as winter crept in, his mother had dropped something of a bombshell…
Harry was feeling better than he had ever felt in his life before, capable of taking on the entire world, the night she had come to him in his dreams. In his waking hours he must always contact her if he wished to speak to her, but when he slept it was different. Then she had instant access. Normally she respected his privacy, but on this occasion there was something she must talk over with him, something which could not wait.
'Harry?' she'd stolen into his dream, walking with him through a misty graveyard of great, looming tombstones standing as high as houses. 'Harry, can we talk? Do you mind?'
'No, Ma, I don't mind,' he'd answered. 'What is it?'
She took his arm, held it tightly, and knowing now that she had firmly established rapport let her fears and her urgency spill out of her in a veritable torrent of words:
'Harry, I've been speaking to the others. They've told me there's terrible danger for you. Danger in Shukshin, and if you should destroy him terrible danger beyond him! Oh, Harry, Harry — I'm so dreadfully worried for you!'
'Danger in my stepfather?' he held her close, tried to comfort her. 'Of course there is. We've always known that. But danger beyond him? What "others" have you been talking to, Ma? I don't understand.'
She drew back from him to arm's length, grew angry with him in a moment. 'Yes, you do understand!' she accused. 'Or would if you wanted to. Where do you think you got your talent in the first place, Harry Keogh, if not from me? I was talking to the dead long before you came along! Oh, not as well as you do it, no, but well enough. All I ever managed were vague impressions, echoes, memories that lingered over — while you actually talk to them, learn from them, invite them into yourself. But things are different now. I've had fifteen years to practise my art, Harry, and I'm much better at it now than when I was alive. I had to practise it, you see, for your sake. How else was I going to be able to watch over you?'
He drew her close again and wrapped his arms about her, staring deep into her anxious eyes. 'Don't fight with me, Ma, there's no need. But tell me now, what others are you talking about?'
'Others like myself, people who were mediums in life. Some, like me, are dead only recently in the scale of time, but others have been lying in the earth a very long time indeed. In the old days they were called witches and wizards — and sometimes they were called worse than that. Many of them died for it. These are the ones I've been speaking to…'
Even dreaming Harry found the idea chilling: dead people talking to other dead people, communicating between their graves, considering events in a waking, living world from which they themselves had departed for ever. He shuddered a little and hoped she didn't notice. 'And what have they been telling you, these others?'
They know you, Harry,' she answered. 'At least, they
know of you. You're the one who befriends the dead. Through you, the dead have a future — some of us, anyway. Through you, there's a chance some of us can finish the things we never finished in life. They look to you as a hero, Harry, and they too worry for you. Without you there's nothing left for their hopes, you see? They… they beg you to give up this obsession, this vendetta.'
Harry's mouth hardened. 'You mean Shukshin? I can't do that. He put you where you are, Ma.'
'Harry, it's not… not so bad here. I'm not lonely any more, not now.'
He shook his head and sighed. 'That won't work, Ma. You're only saying that for my sake. It only makes me love and miss you more. Life's a gift and Shukshin stole it from you. Look, I know it's not a good thing I'm doing — but neither is it unjust. After this it will be different. I have plans. You did give me a talent, yes, and when this is finished I'll use it well. That's a promise.'
'But this thing with Viktor comes first?'
'It has to.'
'That's your last word?'
'Yes.'
She nodded sadly, freed herself and stepped away from him. 'I told them that would be your answer. All right, Harry, I won't argue it any further. I'll just go now and let you do what you must. But you should know this: there will be warnings, two of them, and they won't be pleasant. One comes from the others, and you'll find it here in this dream. The other waits in the waking world. Two warnings, Harry, and if you fail to heed them… it will be on your own head.'
She began to drift away from him, between the towering headstones, the mist lapping at her ankles, her calves. He tried to follow her but couldn't: invisible dream-stuff
stood between; his feet seemed welded to the gravel chips forming the graveyard's paths.
'Warnings? What sort of warnings?'
'Follow that path,' she pointed, 'and you'll find one of them there. The other will come from someone you'd do well to trust. Both are indications of your future.'
'The future's uncertain, Ma!' he called after her mist-wreathed ghost. 'No one sees it clearly! No one knows for sure!'
Then call it your probable future,' she answered. 'Yours, and also the futures of two others. Someone you love, and someone who asked for your help…'
Harry wasn't sure he'd heard right. 'What?' he yelled at the top of his voice. 'What's that, Ma?'
But her voice and figure and mind had already merged with the swirling mist of the dream and she was gone.
Harry looked the way she had pointed.
The headstones marched like giant dominoes, towering markers whose tops were lost in billowing clouds of fog. They were ominous, brooding, and so was the path between them which Harry's mother had pointed out to him. As for her 'warnings': maybe it was better if he didn't know. Maybe he shouldn't walk that way at all. But he didn't have to walk: his dream was taking him that way anyway!
Harry drifted unresisting along the gravel path between ranks of mighty tombstones, drawn by some dream-force which he knew could not be denied. At the end of the avenue of markers there was an empty space where the mist alone swirled and eddied, a cold and lonely place, and beyond that -
Three more markers, but somehow more ominous than all the others put together. Harry drifted across the empty space straight towards them, and as he approached them
where they towered up out of the earth, so the dream-force gently set him down and gave him back his volition. He looked at the headstones and the mist which half-obscured them slowly lifted. And Harry read the warning his mother's 'others' had left for him carved in deep, geometrically rigid characters in their surfaces. The first stone said: BRENDA COWELL
BORN 1958
SOON TO DIE IN CHILDBIRTH SHE LOVED AND WAS LOVED GREATLY
The second one said: SIR KEENAN GORMLEY
BORN 1915
SOON TO DIE IN AGONY FIRST AND FOREMOST A PATRIOT
And the third one said: HARRY KEOGH
BORN 1957 THE DEAD SHALL MOURN HIM
Harry opened his mouth and shouted his denial: No!'