Necroscope: The Mobius Murders (2 page)

“No, B.J.” He shook his head, knowing she would sense that, too. “I’m tired of searching for them. Oh, I would if there was anything promising to go on, but there isn’t. And you know, the only reason I look for them at all is that I can’t help feeling responsible. I just want to know that they’re okay, that’s all, and not in need of anything. The baby is mine, after all.”

“Yes, I know.” B.J. dropped the Edinburghian accent and her low, husky voice took on a more sober and serious tone. “You’re a very responsible man, Harry. So then, when should I expect to see you?”

“Oh, soon, I’m sure!” he at once replied. “Possibly as soon as tomorrow night…that’s always assuming you won’t be at it again. Partying, I mean.”

She chuckled, and her accent immediately returned. “No, not tomorrow, Harry. Not unless we do some partyin’ o’ our own, you and me, once the bar’s closed and my girls are off home.”

“Is that a promise?” He allowed himself a rare grin.

“Be sure it is,” she answered , her voice a low growl. “More than a promise, it’s a guarantee! After the nicht the moon will be on the wane, and I’ll be mainly free o’ all urges. Well, except for that yin: yere pale sweet body entwined wi’ mine. Then we’ll ride like the wild wind ’til we’re spent, so we will!”

Harry’s voice was likewise husky when he replied: “I’m sure of that. But B.J., watch what you say, else I’ll be getting off this phone with a hard-on!”

“Oh, aye?” she laughed. “Well just leave yeresel’ alone, ye hear? Save it for me, Harry. Save it for yere Bonnie Jean…”

It was just past midday, and the Necroscope sat in an old easy chair looking out through open patio doors into his wildly overgrown garden. Beyond the garden gate a path, also rank, and beyond that a bank over the swirls and eddies of a gently flowing river. The scene was serene, but it hadn’t always been that way. For this was the river which had taken Harry’s dear Ma, drowned under the bitter ice at the hands of a maddened Russian husband, murdered by Harry’s stepfather.

Harry had been a child then, but as a man he’d returned and evened the score. His first kill, which hadn’t seemed like murder at all. Since when there had been—oh, many kills, perhaps too many—of men and monsters, and
by
men and monsters alike. But suicides? Never a one that he could remember. And certainly not in or by way of the Möbius Continuum.
If
it was suicide.

But if not suicide, what then? Misadventure? Somehow Harry didn’t think so. Neither suicide nor misadventure.

He thought back on the sighting:

It had been so very brief, and yet had seemed to convey so much more than its brevity allowed for to Harry’s metaphysical mind. The flailing of useless spastic limbs; the soft sobbing; the gradual dimming like a flame guttering, before finally going out, dying. And now at last he remembered: that indeed the blue glow of the stranger’s track across the infinite vault of the Möbius Continuum had been a fading one, so much so that at the point of egress it had actually blinked out, died!

And its owner with it…?

The Necroscope had often seen just such darkenings or dimmings before; not in the more familiar Continuum, as previously explained, but along the parallel Möbius time-streams. And what were those myriad, incorporeal blue threads flowing and expanding along the future time-stream? Nothing less than the psychic echoes of people in the “real world,” which inevitably blinked out where they terminated in accidental death, fatal diseases, war fatalities, or simple old age—

—Or suicide, or murder, of course.

It might be considered morbid, Harry supposed, to be secretly privy to the aging and decline and passing of so many fellow members of humanity. But maintaining a balance, the Möbius time-streams were even more filled with beginnings. He had witnessed the blindingly brilliant blue star-bursts of thousands of brand new lives in the births of future generations. And suddenly inspired, uplifted by that thought—also with an idea in mind—he determined there and then to pay another visit to the Möbius time-streams.

Getting up from his chair he stepped out through the patio doors into the afternoon garden, and for a moment bathed in the wan sunlight. It was good to feel Sol’s warmth on his face, for the sun and its softly glancing beams were his friends; but the moon and the night were even moreso. So the Necroscope had come to believe since meeting and falling for B.J. Mirlu. It was all part of her allure, of course, similarly implanted in his mind. For the moment, however, he must put thoughts of her aside. She had her own agenda, always, and right now so did Harry.

The making of Möbius doors—of bringing such into being, unseen or acknowledged by anyone but himself—had long since become a matter of utter simplicity, no longer an effort worth mentioning. The Continuum’s esoteric and to anyone else highly conjectural mathematical formulae were ever there, barely submerged in the Necroscope’s percipience, as if just waiting for him to summon them up.

Summoning them now, he opened a hole in the otherwise impenetrable surface of the four-dimensional universe, and without further pause stepped through it.

Darkness—timelessness—weightlessness!
But to Harry it was simply familiar. And fearless, he sensed it surrounding him and felt entirely at ease. The Möbius Continuum was his and his alone among living men. Or rather, it had used to be.

Eager to get on with his investigations, he called into being a door to the past time-stream, and just for a moment gazed out through it before entering. And once again, as ever before, as the Necroscope floated on the threshold of the open door, he was transfixed by the awesome wonder and beauty of what lay beyond it—

—The dazzling, brilliant evolution of all humanity, lit by myriad blue life-threads: a vast whirlpool of light, narrowing down in its centre, distantly and finally (or originally?) converging, coming together maybe two-and-a-half-million years ago in a sapphire core that was mankind’s beginning. And with those countless living souls (for that is what they were) approaching the past-time door, passing it by and hurtling on out of sight, the Necroscope felt a certain disorientation, as if he was falling into the heart of some alien galaxy.

His jaw had fallen open as he gazed and listened. There was nothing of actual sound,
but yet he listened
! It was like standing on a dark hill on a warm summer night, miles from the light pollution of town or city, watching meteorites “sizzling” across the sky. They didn’t actually sizzle—of course not, at least not audibly—but only seemed to; for the
hiss
of their blazing destruction, occurring in the uppermost atmosphere, was all in the mind.

Similarly and mercifully, these speeding souls were silent; even the thought of the deafening babble of all the voices that had gone before was terrifying! But just like the imagined hiss of the aerolites, so they
seemed
to emit a certain almost mystical sound—the sighing resonance of an angelic chorus, an interminable, orchestrated
Ahhhhhhhhhh!—
whose single continuous note existed solely in the Necroscope’s fertile imagination and sounded only in his metaphysical mind…

After a brief yet timeless moment, recovering from the spell of the incredible swarming vista that lay before him, Harry concentrated on the task in hand. One of the blue life-threads beyond the past-time door was his own: the trail he had left and continued to leave in times past. It was also the trail he would be obliged to follow—which he couldn’t possibly leave because it was him, his immutable past—if he was intent upon time-travel. Which of course he was.

He launched himself through the door, mentally reeling himself in along his past-time thread, knowing that what he’d seen in the Möbius Continuum some few minutes less than an hour ago would be mirrored here. And in a few short moments of reversed time there it was, emerging as if out of nowhere on the rim of the Necroscope’s perceptions. That was where the stranger (for Harry no longer considered him an interloper) where his thread had faded and died in the moment before he vacated the Continuum high over the North Sea. But now, reversing that occurrence, the thread came alive in a faintly azure glow.

This was
not
the pure, shining, somehow innocent blue of a newly born child; it was the dull, washed-out blue of a fading soul, an expiring life. Yet here it appeared to
gain
something of colour as it extended itself and sped further back in time. And as Harry controlled his velocity in an effort to match the other’s, so the stranger’s thread became yet more recognizable by virtue of its skittering, irregular, even hag-ridden flight: by analogy, a “mirror-image” of its performance as witnessed by the Necroscope in the Möbius Continuum proper.

Then with a huge effort of will—and enormous faith in his own extramundane skills—Harry achieved something which he had never before so much as attempted: he
flexed
his own past life-thread, wielding it like a living whip across the skein of time past and laying it down parallel with the erratic track of the other! And now he sped forward (or rather backward!) and barely “in time” caught up with the whirling thread at the coordinates where its corporeal counterpart had entered the Continuum. This was precisely what Harry had desired to discover: where, and if possible how, such an entry had occurred.

At which moment something else happened, something he might even have anticipated, when entirely unbidden mutating mathematical equations began scrolling down the screen of his innermost mind: fluxional symbols that duplicated almost exactly the Necroscope’s own formula for calling into existence a Möbius door! Indeed, the formulae were
so
similar that he was almost tempted to believe that somehow, however involuntarily, subconsciously, he had brought these continuously mutating equations into being himself!
Almost
tempted to believe it, but not quite. For there were subtle differences.

Harry knew instinctively that unless he found time to study this new formula more closely, he might well be hard pressed to pin these differences down; but right now, sensing that a door was about to open, there was little or no time for that!

As best he was able, before the foreign formula took effect and shrank back into whichever mind had conjured it, Harry took mental note of its apparent irregularities and attempted to fix them in the back of his own mind. Hopefully he would be able to recall these anomalies as and when required. But now the door—an “alien” door, as he considered it—was warping into existence to one side of him and almost within touching distance.

It formed into being, an interface between the “real” world of three dimensions and the Continuum’s time-streams, but by no means any kind of exit. And anyway, Harry would never attempt a departure from a previous time into the real world, for if that were at all possible it would mean duplicating and perhaps annihilating one or both of himselves! But he believed he might be able to use such a door more properly as a window on times past, which was precisely why he had taken such pains to be here. And in another moment it became apparent that he was not mistaken.