Necroscope: The Mobius Murders (3 page)

Beyond the door, as viewed through a tenuous mist, the Necroscope saw two male figures, the closest with his back to the door—as if unaware that it was there—and the other facing the door but somewhat obscured by the first figure, whose owner was perhaps physically disadvantaged; he was leaning heavily to the right, and shuffling from side to side in order to keep his balance. Small and slim, this one’s rather ragged clothing appeared to hang loosely on him. The other was tall, fat and pale-faced, with red, receding hair and flabby chin; his plumpish fingers were visible where they grasped the seemingly disabled figure’s slumped shoulders, apparently holding him steady.

They were engaged in conversation; the fat man’s lips were moving, but Harry could hear nothing. He took note, however, of a poster on the corner of a brick wall directly behind the disparate pair: an advertisement for the Edinburgh festival, which was due to commence in a week’s time. All of which was seen but dimly, made vague and nebulous by the flux of time on the Necroscope’s side of the door; whereas on the far side time ran true.

But as Harry narrowed his eyes, to focus more surely on the scene beyond the door, what happened next was anything but nebulous and he saw it all too clearly.

The fat man wasn’t holding the other steady after all; his fingers suddenly tightened on the thin man’s threadbare jacket, taking a firmer, preparatory grip on him—and without further warning those fat hands pushed!

In no way suicide, but murder most foul!

As the disabled man staggered backwards through the Möbius door, he instantly morphed from a human figure to a blue luminescence, his parallel life-thread in the time-streams: a thread that was already fading, pulsating and wavering, and—but what the hell was this?—even
shrivelling
, as it began to die out!

There in the silence of past time Harry could hear nothing at all, not even a thought. But as the doomed man’s life-thread went plummeting from sight, snatched off into a brief, terrible future by the time-stream, he recalled only too well the whimpering and sobbing he had heard previously in the Möbius Continuum proper, and his blood ran cold…

At that moment the Necroscope could have let go, could have stopped holding his position in time and followed on behind, if only out of pity…which would have changed nothing, achieved nothing, since he had already been there and the immutable past was over and done with. But now that his view of this fat murderer and the scene of his crime was no longer obscured—except by the mistiness caused by the temporal tide on Harry’s side of the door—there was more he desired to learn; not only of the killer himself but his location in the real world. For example, there was that poster on the corner of the brick wall.

Harry believed he’d seen that poster before, in fact a good many of them, along with banners and colourful bunting, decorating Princes Street in central Edinburgh. Now he saw that he was correct; for beyond the wall’s corner the massive volcanic rock of Edinburgh Castle’s shrub-clad base was totally unmistakable. The murder had occurred in broad daylight, perhaps no more than an hour ago, right there in the city’s bustling centre!

But there was more.

Concurrent with the weird shrivelling of the victim’s life-thread, the fat man’s pale unhealthy face had seemed to thrive; it had suddenly developed a florid complexion, a reddening much deeper than a blush, and a totally evil aspect—an expression of monstrous, malignant satisfaction! And though the murderer’s features remained out of focus, indistinct, still in that self-same moment the Necroscope felt he could well be looking at the face of the Devil himself!

Then once again, as Harry drifted closer to the door, there came that variant formula, this time in reverse, scrolling down the screen of his mind. Voided by the fat man, the door was now closing. But even as it collapsed, so the murderer’s expression abruptly changed, and he gave a massive start as at last he saw or sensed Harry there beyond the threshold!

And the last thing Harry saw was the man’s bottom jaw falling open in a silent gasp, and his piggish eyes starting out in disbelief, as the door “slammed” soundlessly shut…

The Necroscope went home, had a meal he barely tasted, showered and took to his bed just as the light began to fade. Somehow he felt drained, as if he too had suffered some kind of depletion, a sort of shrivelling. He dreamed, nightmared, and jerked awake. He slept again, dreamed, nightmared, came shuddering awake in a cold sweat. It was like that all night; he would no sooner fall asleep than he was there:

Back in the Möbius Continuum or its time-streams: mathematical dimensions full of crumpled bodies, souls as flat as burst balloons, and whirling fleshless corpses whose coronas were lit by the ghostly, flickering glimmer of rotting toadstools rather than the steady blue glow of healthy life-threads!

It wasn’t unusual for Harry to have nightmares—such as he was that was unavoidable—but his dreams were rarely as vivid or as monstrous as this! And morning’s light couldn’t come soon enough…

He woke up yawning, reaching out over his bed, fumbling for the comforting presence of Bonnie Jean—who of course was not there. Nor would she be—not until he’d dealt with this thing, or at least investigated it to the best of his ability and perhaps set it to rights. He knew that the teeming dead, the Great Majority, would want it that way.

After breakfast and a pot of coffee, he called Darcy Clarke at E-Branch HQ in London.

Harry had worked in E-Branch however briefly (the “E” stood for ESPionage,) and he thought of Darcy as being foremost among only a handful of friends—even a close friend, or as close as most
living
people could ever get to the Necroscope. Harry knew that he owed the man one or two favours, but also that E-Branch owed him a far greater number. By E-Branch standards, however—considering the Branch’s “normal” line of work—the favour he was about to ask was only a very small one.

But first there were the various security protocols, as the Head-of-Branch activated scrambler devices in his office, monitoring Harry and confirming his identity. Until finally:

“Harry?” came Darcy’s voice down the wire. “What a pleasant surprise—I think! We don’t hear from you any too often these days—not often enough, anyway. But having said that, whenever we
do
hear from you I get these…oh, I don’t know, these nervous twinges? Telling me like maybe I should run the hell away? If you know what I mean…”

Harry smiled, however wrily. He knew exactly what the other meant, for Darcy was a deflector. Like everyone at E-Branch HQ, he had his own peculiar talent; in his case it stopped him getting into trouble, deflecting him away from anything that might prove to be dangerous. Probably unique and largely inexplicable, the thing was Darcy’s personal parapsychological guardian angel which, since the Branch handled cases that were decidedly weird and usually dangerous, made him the perfect man for the job. It was obviously of great benefit to him…but on the other hand he had no control over it, was only fully aware of the thing on those none-too-rare occasions when he gazed either deliberately or even unconsciously directly into the face of danger.

“Yes, sure I understand,” Harry finally replied. “But don’t let it bother you, Darcy. This time all I want is information.”

“Damn!” said the other. “I was hoping you were going to ask me for your job back—or even
my
job, except I know there’s no way you’d take it…er, is there?”

“I
couldn’t
take it, Darcy,” said the Necroscope. “All that paperwork and so forth; being in charge and responsible for all you mind-spies; having the Minister Responsible forever looking over my shoulder and breathing down my neck—it just wouldn’t work for me, or for E-Branch. I have my own things to do and my own way of doing them. And anyway you know why I left…why I had to leave.”

“Yes,” Darcy answered. “Brenda and the child. And I’m guessing you haven’t found them yet, that you’re still searching for them? Any luck, Harry? Everyone here would like to think so. We know how much it means to you.”

“How much it used to, you mean,” Harry corrected him. “I’ll tell you something, Darcy. You know that old saw about absence: how it makes the heart grow fonder? Well, it doesn’t—not my heart—not when the absence drags on and on, year after year, apparently endlessly. I search for them out of a sense of…I don’t know, duty? That’s all it comes down to now, duty. And if I should find them, then what?”

For a moment Darcy was silent—didn’t know how to answer, found himself in a quandary—until finally he said, “You think maybe we should stop searching for them, too?”

“No, by no means!” Harry at once replied, perhaps a little too harshly. “And who told you I’d stopped searching?
I
didn’t! I only said I was tired of it all, worn down by it, or words to that effect.” In the next moment, however, as he sensed Darcy’s dismay, he let him off the hook by changing the subject. “No, I don’t want you to stop searching for Brenda and the baby, but I would like you to research something else for me.”

Darcy sighed his relief. “Anything I can do for you, Harry, you know you only have to ask. What’s the problem, and how can we help?”

“Simply put, the problem is murder!” The Necroscope replied. “At least one really weird murder. I can tell you what I’m looking for but can’t go into any great detail, not even on a scrambled line. I don’t want to compromise myself…my skills? But you know what I’m talking about.”

“A really weird murder,” Darcy repeated Harry thoughtfully, cautiously. “And you’re worried about compromising your abilities, your ‘speciality?’ Harry, please tell me we’re not talking about—”

“About a vampire?” Harry cut him short. “No, not that.” But at the same time he was thinking:
Not that
kind
of vampire, anyway. But some sort of big fat leech, that’s for sure!

“Well at least that’s a relief!” said Darcy. “So okay, I’ll press you no further. But how can E-Branch help? What is it you want us to research, Harry?”

“I’m correct in thinking you use a clipping agency, right?”

“Yes, several. And not merely clipping agencies. In fact we have fairly comprehensive access to almost everything that goes down, especially the weird stuff. And if we don’t have it there are other Security Services that do. We can dig into almost anything that’s been of special interest to us as far back as—I don’t know—way back in the middle ’60s when Sir Keenan Gormley first got E-Branch on its feet.”

“Good!” Harry nodded—if only to himself. And after a moment’s pause for thought: “This murderer I’m looking for, I have reason to believe his crime or crimes are of a sort that end up in the police’s unsolved files, so-called cold cases. And while of course there will be ‘missing’ people, there may not be many bodies or identifiable victims, without which it’s difficult to prove anything. Do you follow?”

“So far so good,” Darcy replied. “Go on.”

“So what I’m asking for is a list of people who’ve suddenly gone missing, and especially from the Edinburgh area, let’s say in the last six months or so? Because apart from the one I know of, there may have been others. You see, I think my murderer is probably a serial killer. I think murder—his particular kind of murder—is something from which he derives a weird sort of benefit. It isn’t money or revenge, at least I don’t reckon so, but something I can’t put my finger on just yet. And I’m sorry, but that’s it; I can’t be more specific than that.”

Darcy mulled it over, then said, “Harry, have you any idea how many people go missing from the Edinburgh area, or any city of a comparable size, in the space of six months?”

Harry chewed his upper lip. “Quite a few, I’m sure.”

“Dozens!” Darcy came back at him. “Maybe as many as a hundred! Usually they’re kids, runaways. And let’s not forget the itinerants: wanderers in search of work, or maybe escaping from work, or just running from whatever problems they can’t face up to. There are criminals on the run from the law, and from other criminals; wives escaping from brutal husbands, and vice versa! There are a hell of a lot of reasons, other than murder, Harry, why people go missing.”

“Of course,” said the Necroscope. “But the reason for this missing person is murder—bloody awful murder! I know, because I saw it! So, can you help me?”

“Absolutely,” Darcy replied. “When do you need your list?”