Necroscope: Harry and the Pirates: and Other Tales from the Lost Years Read Online Free PDF Page A

use some help, but from the looks of these two bully boys only a very little help. And by the way: good day to you, too!
    Er, I was going to come and look you up
, said Harry truthfully if belatedly.
In fact there are several old friends close by who I’ve yet to talk to
.
    It’s okay, no sweat
, Sergeant answered, and the Necroscope sensed the grin he’d be wearing if he still had a face on which to wear it.
But hey, do you want me to handle this? If so you’d better let me in
.
    Harry opened his mind to him—opened it all the way—and at once felt the other’s presence like a mild electric shock in his body and all his limbs. By which time he had almost reached the four people where they faced each other off.
    The smallest of the two thugs had become aware of his approach and said, “Hey, Jim, will you look what’s here? Some kindof twat in a hat!” With which he burst into sniggering laughter and did a funny little foot-stamping jig. “I mean, just
look
at this bloke—his flashing eyes and hard-man scowl! God, I could die laughing! Talk about the Caped Crusader to the rescue? Well in this bloke’s case it’s the floppy-hatted twat!”
    “Eh?” said the slack-faced larger thug, releasing his grip on the young man’s shirt and turning to look at Harry with dull narrow eyes. “What did you say, Kev?” Jim, who obviously wasn’t nearly as clever as Kevin, focussed his eyes on Harry for a few seconds before bursting into guttural laughter like his smaller companion. And: “Oh yeah, I get it!” he said. “A twat in a twat hat, eh? Right?”
    By now the Necroscope was within arm’s length of the group. As he came to a halt and without preamble, he said, “You have a choice, you two: to either get on your way or to get hurt, it’s up to you. So what’s it going to be?”
    “Eh?” said Jim—his favourite comment, apparently—as a disbelieving frown furrowed his forehead.
    “Were you born thick, you fellows?” said Harry, grinning a deliberately caustic grin that he kept in reserve for occasions like this. “Or did it take a lot of practice? Maybe you studied for it in reform school, right?”
    As it happened, however, they weren’t quite that thick and the Necroscope knew from the way their jaws dropped that he had beaten these thugs at their own game, taunted them beyond endurance.
    Jim and Kevin glanced at each other furtively, and yet in a fashion familiar to them; for they had known similar situations before. And as an unspoken message passed between them, then as one man they turned on Harry and lashed out at him with knobbly fists—which was an enormous mistake. For of course “Sergeant” Graham Lane was now a part of Harry, mind and body.
    The Necroscope’s dead friend, an ex-Army physical training instructor and a very hard man in his time—a man who had left the Army early to become a PTI for pre-teen schoolchildren, and who had died in an accident when Harry was just such a child—hadloaned his martial arts expertise to Harry on several occasions in the past and was pleased and eager to be able to do so again. Since the Necroscope was his only contact with the world of the living, however, this was hardly surprising; and just as Sergeant was into Harry’s mind, so the Necroscope was into his:
    Sergeant!
he now cautioned the dead man.
Hurt them, by all means, but try not to break any bones. Please remember that I’m the one who might have to explain it if you do
. . . . Oops!
    That last because Sergeant didn’t appear to be listening.
    Leaning back from the wildly flailing arms of the pair of bullies, Harry’s supple body turned side-on and bent at ninety degrees at the waist away from his opponents. At the same time his right foot came off the ground, his heel stiffening into a club that his piston leg drove into the larger thug’s genitals.
    “Ow!” that one at once grunted, gentling his groin in both hands, dropping to his knees, and slowly toppling over sideways to the