Necroscope: The Mobius Murders (10 page)

With heavy curtains drawn across the glazed patio doors, in the pool of yellow light cast by a table-lamp’s circular shade, Harry slumped down in his chair, gradually immersing himself in that which any normal mentality must surely consider a drifting maze of abstruse and esoteric numbers—but not
merely
numbers, not as ordinary men are given to understand such.

With his eyes half shut, it was as if Harry floated through some vast and cosmic brain’s neural pathways, a labyrinth whose walls and whorls were composed of continuously evolving symbols and equations, ciphers and numerals, algebraic and decimal permutations, logarithmic computations and complex calculuses that strove to explain and manipulate all of the constantly changing quantities. In effect and in mathematical terms, the Necroscope was adrift in an as yet incomplete interpretation of the entire space-time universe! But he knew that these were patterns—the very DNA of existence—which only God Himself could ever bring to a conclusion or summation, because God alone was the author, the Ultimate Mathematician.

August Ferdinand Möbius had been here before Harry, it went without saying; but even Möbius, Harry’s mentor, would not have been able to interpret one quarter of what was hidden or hinted at here. Unlocking the formula to the Möbius Continuum had been his greatest achievement, but even so he’d been obliged to wait until he was dead. For death had set his mind free to solve the many problems that had eluded him in life. And he was out there even now, Harry felt sure, still working on his Grand Theory of Everything.

But that’s how it was with the Great Majority: what so many of them had done during worthwhile lives they continued to do in death or until they moved on…and perhaps even then. But the Necroscope was very much alive, and he’d inherited not only his mother’s and her mother’s psychic skills but the Möbius Continuum, too—
and
his mentor’s numerical genius.

Harry knew what he was looking for. The formula he used to conjure Möbius doors was only one of several, possibly of many, he felt sure. It had to be so because he had actually witnessed someone or some devil using and misusing just such an inferior, perhaps rudimentary version whose coefficients appeared skewed, subordinate to his own. As the monkey is to man, so this cruder formula was to Harry’s. For while it offered access to the Möbius Continuum, certain important elements of control seemed to be missing. It was like…like a car without a steering wheel, a blunt instrument as opposed to a vehicle; Harry knew that instinctively. What he did
not
as yet know was how it worked: its limitations, how he might use them, or prevent them from being used against him in the future confrontation that he now accepted as inevitable.

And fearless in this unruly mental environment, this self-induced manifestation—lulled by the lure of Lorelei numbers, evolving and expanding exponentially all around him—he almost failed to recognize it,
almost
let it go streaming by into the inner recesses of his own mind, to reside there until, perhaps by some future effort of trial and error, he might try to call it forth again.

But no, having seen it barely in time, he stabilized it in his mind’s eye while yet letting its evolution continue.

It
was the basic framework, the skeleton, of some primitive formula which had the bare bones but never the flesh of a workable conjuration. Riveted in his chair, concentrating his mind, the Necroscope forced it to mutate, creating upon and within it a simple mathematical substratum, a foundation on which to build a congeries of more readily functioning systems. A little flesh was then added to these additional bones, but far too many organs were still missing…

The thing grew; various parts began to interact; the mutations came faster and faster until, afraid of letting some small but significant detail slip past him, Harry slowed the process down. And finally the formula he had sensed at the scene of the crime and the structure he was building coincided, equation for equation and solution for solution—

—
And there it was
, full-fleshed however malformed, inelegant: the Möbius murderer’s device!

Freezing it in position, then conjuring into being his own formula alongside in order to compare them, Harry was now able to detect the structural differences and so determine the weapon’s abilities and limitations. He had already experienced and was aware of some of the former, and his dear Ma and the Great Majority had supplied at least one clue to the latter: the fact that the unknown monster’s victims—the so-called “whisperers”—all seemed to end up in more or less the same place. And now he could see why.

While Harry’s own formula, his mathematical “spell,” was fit for purpose, offering him total control as an adept, there were several stipulations and unwieldy spatial regulations governing the other. One such variable, which at first sight appeared to fit the picture perfectly, in fact controlled inalienable space-time coordinates, vectors and distances. The formula would, and indeed had, created doors of a sort; but where Harry had previously illustrated its use by analogy, the motor car which he had envisaged was suddenly other than a blunt instrument: it was in fact a catapult! Not only was the car minus a steering wheel, it had no brakes, there were no internal handles on its doors, and as surmised it had only one fixed destination or “target.” Once aboard you couldn’t get out until the car’s sudden stop spilled you through a metaphorical windshield into space at that preordained, invariable location over the grey North Sea!

But surely it wasn’t designed this way? Not even its creator could use it without suffering its constraints—not that he was ever likely to attempt such a thing! For even if he brought into being another door while hurtling down half a mile of thin air, still it could only return him to the selfsame place; such was its nature. Or…had it indeed been fashioned this way by the great leech with only one monstrous use in mind—as an aid to mathematical murder?

Everything else that the Necroscope had pictured, building to his discovery of the weapon, was gone now from his thoughts, leaving only the device in question as he concentrated upon it, examining its structure ever more closely. Was it possible, he wondered, to redesign it? Could this “car” be customized?

Harry had never before imagined himself as a creator, only as a rediscoverer of what was already known, that which August Ferdinand Möbius had already discovered. But now he found himself wondering: could he perhaps change this thing, shaping it anew? But why not? However exotic, it was only a flawed formula, and the ingredients (or components) of formulas are rarely immutable. They can be altered to either weaken or improve them; without which there would be no such thing as chemistry, no theoretical physicists, and indeed no sciences, except perhaps of the psychological and immaterial.

The device was now fixed firmly and permanently in Harry’s mind, and as well as his own more perfectly functioning conjurations, he believed he should now be able to call this one into existence just as easily. To prove it he erased the thing, then at once recalled it into being—
and
its alien door along with it!

With something of a shudder (Harry couldn’t help but remember the hellishly greedy and ruddy face of this thing’s author) he closed the door but held the formula in position, unwavering in his mind. There, no problem! But as for changing, rearranging it…

He tweaked it: deleted an unnecessary equation here, added an infinitesimal fluxion there, came close to ruining the thing before just as quickly stabilizing it. It
was
flexible, if only within its own mathematical parameters. And as Harry worked, so the truth began to dawn on him: that this formula had been come upon in error or by accident; that its creator had perhaps inadvertently fashioned something of a Möbius door which, being its maker, he had then seen or sensed as whatever problem he’d been working on crystalized and the dimensional interface—the door itself—had materialized (or immaterialized?) into being for the first time.

Which meant that the genetic mutation that made this loathsome killer the freakish vampire that he was had probably been accompanied and complemented by an intuitive grasp…an intuitive grasp of…of the power…
the power of numbers
!

Why of course! It was surely so! And the Necroscope was at once at odds with himself that he hadn’t immediately understood what was now so obvious to him: that the great leech was also a hugely talented mathematician! Or maybe he
had
been aware of it from the start (he made an effort to excuse himself) but was so engaged, so close to the case, that this yet more serious facet had failed to properly register: the fact that the Möbius monster was also a master of eccentric numbers!

But since the fat man had obviously already experimented in this area with some success, what was to stop him from carrying on? What if he discovered a formula he could more readily control, one he could use as well as abuse? What if, eventually, he stumbled upon Harry’s, or more properly Möbius’ formula itself? And now Harry felt wholly justified in finding excuses for himself, for patently he
had
realized the full gravity of the case, quite apart from the need to identify a murderer and bring him to justice.

Hadn’t he explained to Darcy Clarke why he couldn’t be more specific about the problem, that being because he hadn’t wanted to jeopardize his own special skills? Perhaps that oblique reference with its far greater significance had been indicative of his true appreciation of the situation. Not so much that he was being protective of his talents—though of course he was—but rather that he wouldn’t let them fall into the wrong hands; and especially not the fat and bloody hands of the Möbius murderer.

For if that were to happen…

…Now how in hell would one go about apprehending someone like that?
Harry wondered, alarmed at the very concept. A human leech with the wild talents (at least some of them) of the Necroscope himself? A creature who could disappear into the Möbius Continuum at will, and return a moment later to suck one’s soul out and send one’s shrinking corpse on a one-way journey to the bottom of the deep blue (or grey) North Sea? And what’s more, a murderous mutant freak who wouldn’t hesitate to do so!

The more Harry considered it, the more unsettled he became. But having imagined horrors that didn’t bear thinking about, he was now finding it hard to concentrate on anything else and was becoming physically and mentally weary. Yet despite feeling tired and disinclined, discouraged, he nevertheless returned to tweaking the still ungainly foreign formula.

This wasn’t just another example of his usual tenacity, but something that was taking shape in the back of his subconscious mind: the itchy wriggling of a developing embryonic notion that might well prove to be very important. Call it a hunch, but the Necroscope was an advocate of hunches, oneiric predictions, and precognition. Indeed, there were at least two precogs among his former E-Branch colleagues, and on rare occasions Harry himself had experienced a small handful of vague, enigmatic glimpses of the future. Also, he knew the anecdotal story of the 19th century German chemist Kekule von Stradonitz, who allegedly deduced the structural formula for benzine while asleep! And ever since standing by the tomb of Möbius in Leipzig Harry had also been a confirmed adherent of extinct German scientists and their work. But with his esoteric talents, how could it be otherwise?

Enough—suffice it to say he would never casually disregard any such concept, however unorthodox or unconventional. But in any case the current itch at the back of his mind was barely tactile, almost intangible. And yet…

…
And yet
he sensed that it concerned that previously noted variable coefficient, the one that controlled space-time coordinates. With his head beginning to ache, he looked at it again. It
was
a variable; it could be altered to determine a fantastic number of coordinates; it just
happened
to be (but did not
have
to be) fixed upon just the one, that windblown window high over the North Sea with its terrible half-mile plunge to a premature oblivion.

With regard to the formula’s misuse, however, as the principal tool in the Möbius monster’s modus operandi, it was possible that just a single location had been considered sufficient, at least for the time being. Or perhaps this malignant creature was not entirely aware of what he’d stumbled across here; maybe he had not,
as yet
, studied it to such an extent that he understood its full potential.

And with that thought in mind the Necroscope was even more determined that the great leech must never be given the opportunity to explore the thing that far, or indeed
any
further…

The sound of an approaching motorcycle, unusual in this more or less moribund, out of the way district—a sound terminating in a loud backfire—startled Harry from morbid introspection. He was at first surprised to find that the soft yellow glow of the table-lamp seemed suddenly to have strengthened; the result, he quickly realized, of the gloom that had
not
so suddenly descended. And a glance at his watch verified the fact that, entirely unaware of the passage of time, he’d been working on the heterogeneous formula for several hours!