Necroscope: The Mobius Murders (16 page)

Three days, and again Lambert had been right: Harry had plenty of time to plan how he would go about it. But meanwhile he had to take into account that all of this was still circumstantial—that there was
still
no absolute evidence: no fingerprints, no bloody axe, no smoking gun—and that no court in the “civilized” western world of human rights would ever convict a man because he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And because Harry himself believed (to some extent) in law and order—
and
justice, if only his own kind of the latter—it meant that despite the knowledge he’d accumulated, still he continued to harbour certain small niggling doubts about Hemmings’ guilt. Oh, by his own standards he was satisfied that he was guilty as hell, but he didn’t
know
he was guilty! Not yet.

However, Harry’s Ma and the Great Majority were still working on it, and in the morning he would go to the riverbank and find out if they had come up with anything new.

And meanwhile…

Well his sleep had been disturbed enough just recently, so maybe tonight he could do some catching up. But even as he was yawning, switching off the lights, on the point of retiring—the telephone rang.

It was one of B.J.’s girls at the Wine Bar, passing on the information that Bonnie Jean would be staying: “up north, aye, for a wee while longer, for her guid friend Auld John isnae at all well.”

At which Harry sighed his relief, but not into the ’phone. And while it was hardly that he desired to bring down any harm on Auld John—whomever he might be—nevertheless:
Thank God for that!
thought the Necroscope…

Almost at once, the moment his head hit the pillow, Harry fell asleep. And while he slept the sleep of the just, in Gordon J. Hemmings’ house in Dalkeith—in the selfsame bed where he had murdered his father—the great leech dreamed once again that precognizant dream of less than two years previously which had delivered into his mind and hands the incomplete variant formula for a lethal portal into the Möbius Continuum.

It had been a von Stradonitz moment, the result of the ex-professor’s fascination with eccentric, esoteric equations and formulas in general; of a brilliant if twisted mind theorizing outside the box; of a brain in conflict with the accepted laws of physics. And in that seminal dream—seminal for Hemmings’, at least—a vortex of numbers, no less than Harry Keogh himself might have conjured into being, had finally coalesced and created an interface with (for want of a better description)
a parallel place
; a gateway into an alternative dimension; a new, higher level of mathematical consciousness…and to Gordon J. Hemmings, in a moment of revelation worthy of the fearful instinct of a ghoul, a perfect waste disposal unit for spent human refuse, or more properly for drained and wasted human beings!

Then, starting awake, the fat leech-like creature had come bloating like a monstrous mushroom from his bed, erupting into frantic activity, desperate to set the “spell,” as he imagined it, down on paper, and secured in his memory, before the dream could disappear into some subconscious limbo. And it had taken that entire day before he was satisfied that at last he had it.

The proof of that had come with the door itself: that weaving, near-invisible shimmer on the rim of his awareness, like a hole in the material of space-time, beyond which there was only the ultimate, infinite darkness of the Möbius Continuum. But as for what it really was or where it led—if it led anywhere at all and not simply
outside
—that had been a question for which there had been no immediate answer.

It irritated, frustrated Hemmings that he had created something he couldn’t fully understand, over which as yet he had no control; and for endless hours through that first night, to the exclusion of all else, he had given it his uttermost attention, calling up and erasing the door over and over again, attempting to familiarize himself with it as if it were a living thing. He knew it would better suit his morbid purpose if the “refuse” he disposed of were to vanish completely from the world of men…but what if it did not? What if the bodies should be discovered somewhere, and what if he had left a trace of himself—a hair, a blob of drool, or the smallest speck of DNA—on the clothing or flesh of a victim? The odds against it were enormous…but no, Gordon J. Hemmings was a perfectionist; he would never again submit himself to the mentally debilitating concerns, the overwhelming worries he had known following the murder of Professor Emeritus Latimer Calloway.

Oh, that had worked out all right in the end (the official post-mortem verdict had been a heart attack; which it had been,
after
Hemmings was done, or almost done, with the doddering old simpleton,) but oh how he had fretted and sweated until at last the verdict had come in, when he’d learned the supposed “facts” of it in the newspapers. For he had been disturbed at the scene of the crime that time, almost caught red-handed—not to mention red-faced!—there in the evening woods close to Calloway’s country house, when a courting couple had arrived all unexpected on the scene out of the velvety dark.

But no, satisfied that Calloway was dead or dying—if not drained completely—Hemmings had fled into the trees and made his way back to Dalkeith. And now, recalling how he’d read with relief and satisfaction of the old Professor Emeritus’ supposed natural death in the papers, the solution to this other problem when finally it dawned on him had seemed not only the very simplest thing but therefore the most obvious answer. And the next night, after making some necessary purchases under a false name at a ship-chandler’s on the coast, he had put it to the test.

Shortly after midnight, having brought into being a portal, Hemmings had fired a volley of three Very lights into the darkness beyond the door. And since his considerable but incomplete knowledge of abstruse mathematical matters, along with a limited understanding of certain parts of the weird formula, had led him to the paradoxically mainly correct conclusion, that beyond the door space and time must be either non-existent or infinite—or perhaps
both
,—then the three signal flares would probably still be active whenever, wherever,
if
ever they returned to contemporaneous reality. And if by chance that emergence should take place in the vicinity or within sight of observors, it was surely reasonable to expect that so curious an occurrence would soon be reported…where else but in the newspapers?

Which was why, impatient and excited following his initial experiment, Hemmings had lain mostly awake in his bed, tossing, turning, and managing only a hour or so’s sleep at best. And in the morning when the town awakened, he had been among the first customers at the news-stand, buying copies of several local and national papers.

At first disappointed, eventually on the eighth page of the
Montrose Monitor
he had come across the following late entry:

A FOOLHARDY HOAX!

News flash!—or “flashes”—of a sort: three of them, in fact! Last night, just a few minutes past midnight, residents of Stonehaven, enjoying a late-night engagement party on the beach, witnessed a strange sight out at sea: three brilliant globes of light, apparently descending from a great height over the fairly placid ocean.

The same lights were observed by workers on the
Seagasso
oil and gas rig who took them—in spite of their exceptional altitude and the calm nature of the sea—as signal flares indicating a request for assistance from a vessel, possibly a fishing boat in difficulty. The Aberdeen Coastguard was at once informed; they launched a high-speed lifeboat, but despite a thorough search of the area assisted by the
Seagasso
rig’s powerful searchlights, neither an endangered boat nor any evidence of such was discovered.

As for the opinion of the Coastguard Commander: “This could only have been an incredibly stupid hoax by foolish people out in a speedboat, who decided to have some ‘fun’ at the expense of the public, the coastguard, and the hard-working folk aboard the
Seagasso
. Idiotic pranks such as this are not only a waste of time and resources, but could easily cost the lives of innocent folk, putting the lifeboat crew in unnecessary jeopardy while performing an utterly pointless task to the best of their ability.

“Anyone who thinks he may be able to identify the responsible person or persons should call the information in at once to the nearest police station, where punitive action will be taken…”

And then, as a footnote:

Among the forementioned partygoers, a prominent member of the Aberdeenshire UFO Society (name withheld) has told this reporter that sightings of this sort are not unusual at this time of year. He states that:

“The UFO Society has records of previous occurrences of a like nature in these northern latitudes, and as no other rational explanation is forthcoming, it seems only prudent to at least accept the possibility of an extraterrestrial visitation.

“Since some of these visits have been repetitive over several days and/or nights, a few local members of the society will be keeping a lookout for further events. Detailed reports of any future sightings are of course welcome and will always be appreciated…”

Over the sea!…Hemmings’ parallel continuum emptied its dead or dying freight out over the deep blue—or grey—North Sea! And where better, unless it were nowhere at all? No words could adequately describe his excitement as he waited for darkness to fall once again, the midnight hour, when he would call up another door and repeat the experiment. He must, if only to ensure that the coordinates of the exit remained constant. And thanks to the efforts of the Aberdeenshire UFO Society’s jubilant report in the
Montrose Monitor
the next morning, Hemming’s second test had proved beyond further doubt that employing his “spell” to despatch drained victims to their fate, he could be sure they would all end up in the same location: at the bottom of the sea…

All of these events, then, and the evil that had followed them, had been the outcome of Hemmings’ initial revelatory dream. But now as he dreamed once again of the formula, much of the original thrill and excitement of his discovery had evaporated away. Having grown far more familiar with the thing through monstrous usage—or familiar at least with its mundane interface,—now in his dreams, or his “von Stradonitz pursuits,” as he was wont to think of them, he would sometimes find himself pondering its mazy intricacies. Mathematical prodigy that he was, still there was so much he didn’t understand about it; which was galling to say the very least.

For instance: that irritatingly awkward equation or involution which seemed to control distances, heights, and space-time coordinates in general. While in practice it suited the purpose of the formula overall—as Hemmings had ascertained first with his Very lights rehearsals, then with his rather more important and pertinent
evictions
,—still it didn’t look right. Mathematically misshapen or perhaps misarranged, it felt oddly skewed, more than a little out of kilter with the rest of the formula.

But misarranged or misconstrued? Was it really so? This was
his
spell,
his
discovery,
his
formula, wasn’t it? He, Gordon J. Hemmings had conjured it from his own dreaming mind, hadn’t he? How then could it be misarranged? For after all it was
his
arrangement!