Necroscope: The Mobius Murders (11 page)

There came a knocking at the back door of the house.

Harry’s orientation, his sense of place to the contrary, he had always considered his living-room in the quarter of the old house that faced the river to be at the front, and the opposite elevation, bordered by a crumbling pavement in a short deserted street of sorts, to be the rear. Now, with everything mathematical banished temporarily from his mind, he got up and made his way through the house along a wide, dark corridor to the “back” door, opening it to a helmeted, uniformed policeman—a courier—whose motorcycle now stood idle at the kerb.

“Mr. Harry Keogh?” inquired that one, mispronouncing Keogh and, without waiting for a reply, handing Harry a stiff-backed, slightly larger than A4 manila envelope with neither an address nor any return address.

Harry took it, checked both blank sides, and said, “From?”

“I’ve no idea, sir.” The other shrugged apologetically. “I just deliver stuff, that’s all—but important stuff, usually. I can tell you this much: it was wired in from London about an hour-and-a-half ago, and could only be handled by a senior officer—which is why it’s taken so long to reach you. It arrived at the Bonnyrig police post, and we had to call someone in from the city.”

“Ah, yes!” said Harry. “I think I know what this is. Thanks a lot.”

“You’re very welcome, sir.” With which the courier returned to his motorcycle, kick-started it, made a tight turn, and rode off along the bumpy potholed street, back the way he’d come and into the deepening dusk.

From E-Branch
, Harry nodded to himself, taking the envelope back to his study and switching on the main light.
Darcy Clarke with my list…and from its weight not much of a one at that.

Seated at the table, he opened the envelope and removed the A4 envelope that was inside it. This one bore his name and address plus a red “For Your Eyes Only” sticker. Inside there were five sheets of paper covered with an alphabetical list of names, some of them only forenames, nicknames, or aliases, each of the latter identified by a “pseudo” prefix and highlighted in luminous yellow. There were some eight or nine names to a sheet, all with approximate ages, sketchy descriptions, previous haunts or workplaces,
“last seen ats”
…and etcetera. Similarly accented in yellow, the particulars of those persons missing from the Edinburgh region were brought at once to Harry’s attention despite the alphabetical system.

It appeared Darcy Clarke had done a thorough job here, and the Necroscope was obliged to reconsider his initial impression that this wasn’t going to be much of a list. If anything it was
too
much of a list, but at least the illuminated sections would make searching through it a lot easier. That would have to wait until a good night’s sleep had brought him back up to scratch.

Before that, however with E-Branch and Darcy fresh in mind, Harry called the HQ in London. In answer to his call, the Night Duty Officer informed him that “the boss” had shut up shop for the day and gone home.

“I’ll try again tomorrow,” Harry told him, then changed his mind, called Darcy’s home number and got him on the second ring.

“Harry, is that you?”

“How did you know?” he asked, knowing full well the answer. “What, another nervous twinge? That has to be very off-putting, but in your line of work I imagine it happens a lot.”

“Yes, far too often,” the other replied ruefully. “And when
you
are involved, always!”

Harry couldn’t help but laugh, but sympathetically. “Maybe you should consider yourself lucky I got out of E-Branch when I did,” he said. “Or I’d be there most of the time and you’d find your guardian angel keeping an even closer eye on you!”

“Ah!” Darcy answered, much too eagerly. “That’s an entirely different matter, Harry! And as I’ve said before, and recently, any time you want my job, or you just want to freelance for us, all you have to do is—”

“Forget it,” the Necroscope cut him off, shaking his head. “Nothing’s changed, Darcy, or not much. I’ve still got problems of my own. At least one problem, anyway—the same big problem as before—which is why I’m calling you again.”

“Oh!” Darcy replied, his disappointed tone implying a great deal more than that one small exclamation. “I supposed it might be so, but you can’t blame me for trying.”

Harry appreciated the fact that the Head-of-Branch would do almost anything to have him back; but since that was out of the question, he changed the subject and said: “Anyway, I think you can ignore your twinges because just like before this shouldn’t involve you personally, or not that much. Okay?”

“Go ahead,” said the other.

“Okay, this is what I want you—er, what I would
like
you—to do for me.” He paused to give it a moment’s thought, then went on: “You see, Darcy, things have moved on, started to come together since I asked you for this list; which just got here a couple of minutes ago, by the way, and thanks for that. But now there’s more. Perhaps you can get on to somebody at the Branch, get him working on it overnight…a job for the Duty Officer, maybe?”

“I’ll see what I can do. But what is it you need, Harry?”

“This murderer I’m looking for…maybe I can describe him for you, at least something of a description. He’s a fairly big man, maybe five eleven, and he’s bulky, even fat. He has a piggish, somehow greedy face, small eyes, and reddish hair. He’d be somewhere between thirty-five, forty-fiveish. Oh, and most importantly, he has to be some kind of intellectual—a scientist, maybe?—
and
a mathematician, definitely! His IQ has to be way beyond the reach of your average schoolmaster! And that’s about it, Darcy. For the time being, there’s nothing more you need to know, nothing more I can tell you…”

For a few moments the other was silent, then said: “I suppose you’re aware that this, too, is something of a tall order, Harry? I mean, a heavy-set, pig-faced scientist or mathematician? It’s a bit vague, don’t you reckon? Why, if memory serves I might have had one of those myself, during my last few years in allegedly higher education. Not that it got
me
any higher!”

The Necroscope sighed and said, “Yes, I know it’s not much to go on. But I do have someone, or ones, other than the Branch searching for this beast, and I still have a couple of ideas of my own to work on. But I can’t overemphasize just how important this is, Darcy, and not only to me and his victim or victims. If I don’t find and stop him soon, he’ll pose a terrible threat to everyone eventually…and I do mean
everyone
! Look at it this way: can you imagine how bad things could get if
I
were some kind of murdering psychopath? That should give you some idea of the kind of power this creature could end up controlling. Which really is all I want to say about it at this time…”

There was another brief pause before Darcy replied: “You’ve already said more than enough, Harry…in fact you’ve just now put some very terrible pictures in my head, sufficient that I’m going to get right on it! So any kind of help we can give you—anything at all—as of right now you know you’ve only got to ask and you’ll get it.”

“Yes, I’m sure of that, Darcy,” said Harry. “I always have been.” And he put the ’phone down…

Harry glanced at the list again, just glanced at it, then took a couple of aspirins, showered, and went to bed. It wasn’t very late, but he was tired and apart from his headache his mind was already full of information he’d be perfectly happy to do without; except he knew he had to retain it, because it was invaluable.

He tossed and turned for a while; turned things over in his head, too, as the ache slowly subsided, and finally fell asleep—at which it was just like last night all over again, with the added aggravation of an endless series of mathematical (or more properly kabbalistic) incantations or invocations, calling into being a phantasmagoria of improbable formulae. And behind these myriad numerical evolutions—like some vast and burning screen on which the equations danced—the great leech’s fat red devilish face grinned repulsively, while his evil eyes seemed fixed on the invisible Necroscope as if sensing him there!

And even asleep and nightmaring, Harry thought:

When I find him and we meet, it won’t come as a surprise to him, or not a very big one, and I won’t have much of an advantage. He’s seen me before, albeit fleetingly, but actually meeting me, seeing me in the flesh, has got to set alarm bells ringing. He’ll
remember
me! And then, if he has his way…then it will be my turn!

As is prevalent in unruly dreams, such thoughts as that can work as invocations in their own right. This time they conjured up an all-too-familiar alien door, through which Harry tumbled, immediately finding himself back in the Möbius Continuum, shrivelling to a mummy and already three-quarters dead as he hurtled toward his doom half-a-mile over the grey North Sea!

There was no exit; he was trapped here; he felt his essence draining away, his soul melting down to a nub…!

And at that point:

You’ve had some terrible dreams in your time, son
, said his Ma out of nowhere.
But I’m really quite sure it’s time you woke up from this one!

“Ma? Am I dreaming you?” Harry’s headache was gone, but his heart was hammering and his pillow was damp with cold sweat. He was suddenly awake, jerking to a seated position in his tousled bed. And seeing his bedroom in the pale stripes of a dawn light that filtered in through a louvered window, he breathed a massive sigh of relief and, however slowly, began to relax.

“I…I was dreaming,” he told himself then. “It was only a dream, a nightmare.”

But at least part of it wasn’t, for his Ma was still there.

Yes, you were dreaming
, she told him—startling him again!
But not of me. Your dreams were
fearful
, and I’m glad I was able to interrupt them. But you shouldn’t worry about it, Harry, for I’m not in the habit of spying on you in your sleep! I wouldn’t do that. It’s just that I have news I thought you would want to hear as soon as possible.

“News?” he mumbled, still shaken and only half awake.

From the Great Majority, yes. The whisperers got through to us. Or rather, we finally got through to them.

Excellent! thought the Necroscope. Exactly what he had been wanting to hear—but not until he could more properly take it in. It was after all still very early morning.

“Ma, would you mind if I have breakfast first?” he said. “I need something to eat, and it’ll help if I jump-start my system with a little caffeine. Then I’ll come and see you, okay?”

Of course, son
, she replied, as he got out of bed and began to dress.
And you’ll know where to find me, as always…

No more than an hour later, on the riverbank:

“So what’s your news, Ma? What have you discovered?”

Not just me
, she replied,
but a concerted deadspeak effort by the Great Majority, concentrating as one mind on those pitiful whispers from the bed of the ocean; until finally the dead and drowned ones heard them! But first they weren’t able to reply; their poor dispossessed voices—what was left of them—were simply too weak. If I may put it this way: as individuals their souls were mere vestiges, the very ghosts of ghosts!

But then, taking their cue from the teeming dead, they got together. And already
being
together, as it were, close to each other on the ocean floor, they conferred and elected a speaker through whom to channel their joined thoughts. And in so doing their mental messages, though still very faint, were amplified by a factor of four or five, perhaps even six! Which serves to tell us something of the extent of the killer’s terrible activities! So now, finally, their deadspeak whispers are at least audible to us. And to you too, son, for I can put you in touch with them.

“But do they know of me? Do they know who, or what, I am?”

Oh yes, for we’ve told them everything. Only speak to them, Harry, and they’ll feel your warmth as all of the dead feel it when you’re close. And then they’ll know it’s you.