Necroscope: The Mobius Murders (19 page)

Yesterday afternoon, using the Möbius Continuum and a series of line-of-sight coordinates, Harry had travelled to a wooded area on the outskirts of Dunblennin, and from there on foot into the town to the location of the rather time-worn Drill Hall: an ex-Ministry-of-Defence building in weed-grown grounds, still being used on occasion by the local Home-Guard Association.

There behind a decaying World War II, graffiti adorned air--raid shelter, he marked his coordinates before returning to the front of the gaunt building. Though the large double doors were locked, Harry was gratified to note that someone had stapled up an impressive poster heralding the next day’s (in fact today’s) lecture by: “Accomplished Scholar and Mathematician, Paranormal Investigator, Gifted Psychic, and Acknowledged Authority on all Matters Metaphysical, Professor Gordon J. Hemmings in Person—Speaking from Seven to Eight PM. Admission: Ten Pounds.”

But that had been yesterday, when the Necroscope was checking out his route to the venue in advance. Now it was just five minutes to seven on the drizzly day itself; lights were glowing dimly in the foyer and shining through fanlights set high up in the doors; and there was a queue of maybe three dozen disparate folk huddling from the thin, unpleasant rain with their collars turned up. They were mainly men, one or two women, a handful of studious- and/or geekish-looking youths carrying copies of recent issues of
Man and Magic
,
Modern Myths
, and
The Unexplained
.

And Harry thought:
The unexplained? And you’re looking for explanations here? Well, small hope of finding them!
Because he really couldn’t picture the Möbius monster giving away any genuinely worthwhile esoterica to this mainly credulous lot!

On the other hand, perhaps he was doing them an injustice; it was possible that some of them had come to sneer and (possibly mistakenly) even to laugh. As for the Necroscope himself: he had come to challenge, and then to see where that got him.

Joining the queue, he stood beside an angular, wiry-haired young man perhaps twenty or so years old, wearing thick-lensed spectacles and a plastic raincoat. Giving Harry a gentle nudge with his elbow, this fellow held up a magazine for him to see; it was a copy of
UFO Monthly
, with a cover blurb that read:

Inside: the Real Deal!

Professor Gordon J. Hemmings

Sees All, Knows All, Tells All—and invites all and sundry to his amazing lectures! A list of future dates and venues inside, with a teaser on alien visitors over Scottish waters and the possibility of an incursion from weird parallel dimensions!

This was something new to Harry who was at once interested. “He has an article in there?” he inquired. “Hemmings, I mean?”

“No sech luck!” said the other. “Naw, it’s just a wee come- on, a sales pitch for this bleddy magazine! No more than a mention o’ suspected UFO sightin’s. Weird driftin’ lights out over the sea off Stonehaven nineteen months ago; two nights runnin’, in fact. Just a hint, a wee leg-pull, that this so-called Professor might be talkin’ about it durin’ his lecture—a come-on, as Ah said. But—” and then more buoyantly, hopefully “—d’ye think he might? D’ye think he really will?”

“Ah! So you’re interested in UFOs,” said Harry, thinking to himself:
Now what on earth…? Unexplained aerial sightings two nights on the trot, out over the ocean—alleged to have occurred a year and a half ago—shortly before Hemmings claimed his first known
Möbius
victim?

There had been other victims before that, yes—and possibly more than Harry was aware of—but not
Möbius
victims, not to his knowledge. So what had these alleged sightings been?

“Tests, maybe?” said the young UFO fancier, almost as if he had read the Necroscope’s mind.

“Eh?” said Harry, momentarily startled by the other’s sudden eagerness.

“Aliens! Lookin’ for a way tae visit us! Experimentin’ with a gateway frae their dimension intae ours!”

“Ah!” Harry answered; and then, because he didn’t know what else to say: “You could be right! Who can say?”
But you’re definitely not too far off the mark!
One
alien certainly, or a man with alien thirsts, alien powers—except he’s already here! As for some kind of test: what, that bloated red devil testing his device not long after he first discovered it? Well, why not?

“But…d’ye think there’s a chance he’ll talk about it?”

Harry shrugged. With his thoughts temporarily elsewhere, he nevertheless managed a reply. “I imagine he’ll be taking questions toward the end of his talk. Maybe you should ask him about it then?”

“Why, Ah just might at that!” said the other. “But look ye, the doors are openin’ the noo!”

Aye
, thought Harry, as the double doors swung open.
So they are. And in we go—the noo!
Which could be his last chance to have a small silent chuckle at himself for quite a wee while to come…

Inside, beyond the foyer, inner doors opened into what had been the drill hall from which the place had taken its name: a large hall where would-be boy soldiers had learned the basic elements of military drill. Now, before a small stage, it was decked out with four rows of stacking chairs twelve to a row, and the rest of the wide expanse of polished oak floorboards was empty. Even under the not too bright ceiling lights the place looked unashamedly naked, making it glaringly obvious that advance bookings had been few and far between.

So, would Gordon J. Hemmings be disappointed? Harry thought not, for the forthcoming lecture was only one reason why he was here, and by no means the main reason. It was just another hunting trip where he was concerned: the monster’s way of spreading his Möbius murders abroad, of making his snail trail more difficult to follow.

But now it was just a few minutes after seven, and suddenly from behind drab curtains in the left wing of the stage…who but the man in question—who but the Möbius murderer in person—had suddenly made his entrance? None other than the fat man, Harry’s quarry, Gordon J. Hemmings himself.

Being one of the last in the queue, the Necroscope had only just paid for his seat, his tenner going to a down-at-heel person who was probably the drill hall’s caretaker, collecting the money on Hemmings’ behalf. Now, as Harry chose an aisle seat in the back row, the collector hastened up onto the stage where he shook hands with the impatiently waiting Hemmings, adjusted the microphone on the center-stage lectern, coughed loudly, and introduced the “guest speaker.”

“And now if ye’ll be so kind, a big hand for the guid Professor Hemmins’ himself, and mah most sincere apologies that Ah had tae hold up the proceedin’s with the takin’s and all. Professor Hemmins’…” With which he nodded to the fat man, accepted his overcoat, and invited him to the lectern before leaving the stage.

Harry joined in the applause which wasn’t much, and unwilling to be noticed just yet turned up his collar, shrank down in his chair and made himself as inconspicuous as possible. At the same time, however, even while trying to mask his own presence, the Necroscope was very much aware of Hemmings’—more specifically of his undeniable magnetism—and couldn’t take his eyes off him.

As for “fat man:” that description of Hemmings was entirely fitting. At some six foot three inches in height and verging on obese, the monster was huge: flabby in his body, jowly, and (but what was this?)
pale-faced
under his combed-forward straggle of receding red hair? But “the red devil”?—as Harry had often as not thought of him—what, pale-faced? At first surprised, however, Harry quickly realized that his expectations, his preconception of Hemmings’ features, had for some time now been based on that unforgettably nightmarish transformation he’d witnessed at the Möbius interface in the alley off Princes Street, as Wee Angus’ life-force was sucked out of him; based on that, and also on Latimer Calloway’s narrative. But now the facts of the matter were fully established…that the malevolent reddening only occurred when this monstrous creature was feeding.

And having started upright in his chair in reaction to Hemmings’ pallid complexion, now Harry was as quick to shrink down again, unnoticed; but still his attention was rapt upon the fat man; upon (but what else to call it?) his magnetism. The Necroscope, psychically gifted, could sense it: this palpable sphere of force surrounding Hemmings like an invisible bubble, sending out writhing tendrils of cold energy into his unsuspecting audience. Some kind of sixth sense or soul-seeking mechanism? Harry was uncertain; perhaps it was simply Hemmings’ mutant nature—his repressed hunger—reaching out and
salivating
, as it were, in anticipation of whatever the night had yet to offer.

Well perhaps, and perhaps not; there was no way of knowing. So that when Harry sensed the strange psychic chill of one such wisp hovering close by, wary and unwilling to let it touch him, he leaned well away and felt relieved when it moved on.

A glance at the others in the audience sufficed to tell him that no one else had been affected by Hemmings’ weird aura, and it appeared that this was all it was: an emanation of which the great leech himself might not be entirely aware, his
otherness
. And satisfied that such was probably the case, Harry refocused his attention upon his quarry and what he was saying.

He had missed only a little of Hemmings’ self-introduction, yet the monster was already well into one of his specialist subjects: mathematics and, according to him, the all-important but misunderstood secrets of abstruse and esoteric numbers.

In this regard, nothing of what the fat man said from where his bulk overflowed the oblong outlines of the lectern was virgin knowledge to the Necroscope; most of it was readily available in text books, and a lot more in Harry’s metaphysical mind. But still it was obvious that compared with any normally numerate person—to any layman—Hemmings was a past master of his subject.

Momentarily losing interest at one point, Harry was quickly drawn back to Hemmings’ discourse when he heard mention of Pythagoras of Samos. The reason for this was that he was well aware of sixth century B.C.’s Pythagoras’ abounding interest not only in mathematics but also the Laws of Nature (in fact the universal laws of physics, which Pythagoras believed could be deduced by pure thought); also in a fifth element other than fire, air, earth and water—which could only be the substance of heavenly bodies, the stars themselves and the spaces between them;—the transmigration of souls; and, of course, mysticism in general.

“Naturally, his were seminal beliefs,” Hemmings’ phlegmy yet oddly gutteral voice reached out to an apparently rapt audience. “Twenty-six centuries ago, Pythagoras and his disciples did not have the benefit of slide rules, computers, quantum physics, or any of today’s scientific marvels. And yet, despite their paranoia over irrational numbers and their determination to obscure or deny various mathematical truths they developed a ‘religion’—which is to say their science—to an amazing degree…”

And after a brief pause, a drawing of breath: “
I
am a Pythagorean! I firmly believe in several Pythagorean…let’s call them ‘theories.’ But unlike Pythagoras I
do
have the benefit of today’s modern scientific marvels, and of the all too frequently limited ‘advances’ that we are alleged to have made. But, in a statement such as that, am I decrying science and scientists? No, I am simply lamenting their inadequacies; I am admitting my belief in an astonishing power of numbers that lies far beyond addition, subtraction and division; beyond the ‘fabulous’ formulae of the physicists: beyond any curious quantum calculations or computer devised simulations, and even beyond—
far
beyond—the beyond itself! And this is a belief to which few contemporaries, if any, give even the slightest degree of credence!

“More fools them…

“Thought,
pure
thought…the
power
of thought! Science is dominated, it relies upon observation and experimentation, methodology—but Pythagoras taught that the laws of nature and the universe were accessible to pure thought! And in that was he so very different to certain of our greatest thinkers?
I
think not. Einstein himself was very fond of his so-called
Gedanken Experiments
, which formed much of his theory of relativity. But away with your blackboards full of risible scribble and bloated calculi; the most important of all Einstein’s equations was indeed as brief as a thought, a scrawl on a scrap of paper, a
Gedacht
: E = mc
²
—without which there would be no atom bomb and no nuclear energy. Which, we may suppose, many would consider a good thing!

“But I tell you, thought experiments such as those are only the beginning, and if Pythagoras had lived in our time, in Einstein’s time,
ahhh
! What marvels then? Well, he didn’t—but
I
do or did, for Einstein died as recently as 1955. And I despair that I never met him, despite his limitations…”