by Brian Lumley
‘The numbers stopped dead on the screen and, like David
said, formed into something solid - a golden dart! Oh, it was faint as a wisp of yellow smoke - pretty insubstantial stuff - but it was real. And then … it left the screen!’
‘It what?’ Trask’s frown knotted his forehead.
‘It left the screen,’ Goodly repeated. ‘And it passed out through the wall of the room and was gone.’
‘Gone? Gone where?’
Geoff Smart the empath had arrived from somewhere. Having heard what had been said, he now put in: ‘I think that’s something you’ll have to ask Nathan, when he comes out of it.’
Trask glanced at the speaker. Smart was something less than six feet tall, sturdily built, red-haired, crew-cut; he looked like a boxer, aggressive, but was in fact mild-mannered. What he lacked in looks found compensation in what Trask called his ‘withness’: his intense ability to relate. His talent was empathy, in which capacity he had worked very closely with Nathan. It was odds-on that Smart would be correct in his as yet unspoken estimate of what had occurred. But unspoken or not, Trask read the truth in it anyway.
‘You’re telling me that this dart - went looking for him?’
Smart nodded. ‘And found him! That’s my bet. I think it’s been in there - in the computer - just waiting for him. Which is why none of you ever messed with Harry’s room all this time, because you could sense it in there. Why not? You’re all espers, after all. But when Nathan got here, the thing revealed itself. And given a power source at last, when Chung plugged it in .. .’
‘.. . The dart went home.’ Trask finished it for him. ‘Went home to Nathan.’
Again Smart nodded. That’s how I see it, yes.’
‘It finished the job that we had started on him,’ Trask continued almost to himself, staring in something approaching awe at the young man on the second bed. ‘It gave him the Mobius Continuum and made him complete. But .. . this was his first time ever? And still he was able to find his way back here — and bring Zek with him?’
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David Chung spoke up. ‘He wasn’t entirely on his own. I mean, I think maybe I had something to do with it. Or rather, that this had something to do with it.’ He held up Nathan’s golden earring in the warped shape of a Mobius loop. ‘A vampire Lord called Maglore gave this to Nathan before he escaped from Turgosheim. I think Maglore was using it to spy on him. But as a locating device the earring works both ways. Nathan must have homed in on it, and that’s how he found his way back here . ..’
Trask looked at them all standing around him. Looked from face to face, and then at Zek Foener and the Necroscope Nathan Keogh, lying tranquillized in their makeshift beds. Finally he grinned and shook his head in wonder. And to Smart, Goodly and Chung, he said, ‘So, all three of you had a hand in it, right? God, what would we do without you? What would any of us anywhere do without you?’ His steady gaze spread to encompass the rest of his espers. ‘And I do mean all of you.’
It was the finest compliment he had ever paid them …
The plan was simple: Nathan had revisited Sir Keenan Gormley’s resting place to ‘fix’ its co-ordinates in his mind, and also to tell the ex-Head of Branch that he was experimenting with the Mobius Continuum. Now, having returned to E-Branch HQ, he would attempt a Mobius jump to Gormley’s Garden of Repose. In the event that something went wrong, David Chung would be ready with Nathan’s sigil earring to guide him home. And so that it would be more in keeping as a genuine scientific experiment, other Branch members would be in situ at Gormley’s memorial, to time any lapse between Nathan’s jump from HQ and his arrival in the Kensington cemetery.
All was now in place. It was 9.00 a.m., and the mid-city temperature was already climbing; Nathan, Trask and a majority of E-Branch agents were in the Ops room, every single man of them with a film of sweat on his brow although the air-conditioning was up full. Finally Trask said, ‘Well, son, and now it’s all yours.’
Nathan smiled nervously, looked at them each in his turn, and last but not least at Zek. She smiled reassuringly, reminding him, ‘You’ve done it once.’
He nodded. ‘When I had to, yes.’
Trask was anxious and said, ‘Look, if you want to postpone this …’
‘No,’ Nathan cut him off. ‘Let it be now. There’s no time left. If I can do it, it will give me the edge I’ll need back on Sunside.’
David Chung stepped forward, grinned self-consciously, and said, ‘Nathan, I…’ and stuck out his hand. They clasped forearms in the Szgany fashion, and Chung stepped back again. Then, as if at a signal, the espers backed away from Nathan where he stood in the centre of the room.
And it was time.
Utter silence fell, and the expressions on all faces grew tense, expectant. Nathan felt the force of their minds concentrated upon him from where they stood in a circle but at a safe distance. And feeling their eyes - their minds - on him like that, and concerned that they might in some way interfere with the process, he closed his own eyes to shut them out. But he couldn’t close his mind. Indeed, he must open his mind -
— Open it, and conjure the numbers vortex!
And at once - instantaneously, so rapidly that the effect almost unnerved him - Mobius equations commenced to mutate on the screen of his metaphysical mind. It was the vortex, and yet it was not the vortex. The numbers, characters and symbols were the same but the pattern was not. There was no actual whirlpool of numbers as such, but an ordered march of evolving calculi and ever-changing equations, like the emerging answer to a question of immense complexity, unravelling onto the screen of some gigantic computer.
But the big difference was this: Nathan was no longer ignorant, no longer innumerate. He now knew what he was looking for, and how to control and use it. And suddenly it
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was there, and he froze it: the Big Equation, framed on the screen of his mind like a page of print-out. Frozen there, yes, for a single moment, before it dissolved and warped … and formed a door.
A Mobius door!
And Nathan sensed that it was here, that it was real. His eyes snapped open and he saw it, there in the room with him, a single pace away. And he knew he was the only one - the only man in the world - who could see it.
The next scene would be remembered forever by everyone who witnessed it. They were intent upon Nathan; they drank in every aspect of him, his looks, dress, stance, even something of his feelings, perhaps, until the picture of the man entire was etched into their extra mundane minds:
Standing erect, head high, staring a little to one side, and with his bottom jaw falling open a fraction as he became aware of something far beyond the sensory range of the rest, Nathan Keogh was an imposing young man of twenty or twenty-one years. His simple clothes, of this world, were nothing special, but the man inside them was. He was the Necroscope, who talked to dead men in their graves and so had access to all the secrets of the past — perhaps even of the future — and yet had no real time to explore or use such knowledge to his own best advantage. Not yet, anyway.
Nathan was something more than six feet tall. He had an athlete’s body: broad shoulders, narrow waist, powerful arms and legs. His eyes might be very slightly slanted, or perhaps it was only his frown, the look of rapt attention on his face as he gazed at the mainly Unknown, which to the rest, with the exception of Zek, was completely unknown. His nose was straight and seemed small under a broad forehead flanked by high cheek-bones. And over a square chin which jutted a little, his mouth was full and tended to slant downwards a fraction to the left. In others this might suggest cynicism, but not in him. Rather, the opposite.
For, looking at Nathan, Ben Trask knew the ‘truth’ of him, which had to be revenant of his father, Harry Keogh: a
natural innocence and compassion, the soulfulness of the mind behind the face. So that without being Keogh’s spitting image, still the visitor ‘felt’ like him. These had been Trask’s thoughts the firs
t time he’d laid eyes on Nathan, and nothing had occurred to change them. As for what was happening here: that could only confirm these thoughts beyond any further doubt.
Nathan viewed the Mobius door and stepped forward. The act was almost robotic, automatic, instinctive; as if he were drawn to the door, as if the place beyond it lured him irresistibly, which of course it did. Then, glancing just once at Trask and the others -
- He took a final, unsteady but resolute pace . .. right out of this world.
He was there - and he was gone! They saw his right foot, calf, thigh, half of his body and face disappear, and the rest of him follow into nothingness. The Necroscope Nathan Keogh was no longer in the room. Just motes of dust drifting in the sunlight through the window blinds, flowing into the vacuum where he had been.
Easily stated, but astonishing to the witnesses. An agent on the briefing podium almost forgot to say his magic word into his handset, and only just remembered in time: ‘Now!’
And the answer came back at once from the Kensington crematorium: ‘Now!’
The man on the podium frowned at his handset. ‘Yes, now, for Christ’s sake! Why are you repeating me? He’s just done it. He’s just gone in.’
And again the answer, in a brief burst of static: ‘Who’s repeating you? I’m telling you! He’s just come out! He’s here, now!’
No time-lapse at all, not to them. But to Nathan:
He stepped in through the metaphysical Mobius door, and entered a place beyond all places, beyond all times, yet encompassed by and encompassing space-time itself. It was not the same as - could not be likened to - any experience he’d ever known before. Even the first time he’d been …
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here, with Zek, less than twenty-four hours ago, it had been different. At the very least there had been water then, a great spout of Ionian sea-water which had entered the Continuum under its own pressure, dispersing to … wherever. Now there wasn’t even that.
There was nothing!
It was a place of utter darkness: perhaps even the Primal Darkness itself, which existed before this universe or any parallel universe such as Nathan’s began. Except there wasn’t only an absence of light, but an absence of everything. Nathan might well be at the entirely conjectural core of a black hole (his E-Branch tutors had dealt with certain of the basic theories of cosmology, at least); except a black hole has enormous gravity, and this place had none. No gravity, no time (and therefore no space), no light. Not a place obeying one single Law of Nature or Science, and therefore a place outside the Universe we know. And yet existing within the Universe we know, for it had twice been conjured by a common — or an uncommon — human being; by the Necroscope Nathan Keogh. As for Nathan’s father: Harry had been an habitual user, almost an inhabitant, of ‘the place’.
Both central and external, the Mobius Continuum was nowhere and it was everywhere; from such a starting point one might go anywhere, or go nowhere forever. And it would be for ever, for in this timeless - environment? — nothing would ever age or change except by force of will… which was a fact that Nathan knew without knowing how he knew it. But then, how does a moorhen chick know how to swim? It was in his mind, his blood, his genes.
A ‘place’, then, this Mobius Continuum: which might well be its best, indeed its only description. But Nathan’s tutors had also touched upon theology, especially that of the Christian religion. And Nathan sensed that in some way this might even be a ‘holy’ place. If so, then little wonder he’d been put to such pains to discover it. For it must be a very private holy place, in which no God as yet had uttered
those wonderful words of evocation: ‘Let there be light!’ Or if such words had been spoken … then this was the source of everything, the initial singularity from which THE ALL had shone out in a great and glorious beginning!
And as that thought dawned, at a stroke, so Nathan hit upon the greatest secret of all, which had taken his father a veritable lifetime to discover. But it was only a thought, which he hadn’t recognized as the truth .. .
What he did recognize was this: that empty as this ‘place’ was - and as far removed from man’s laws as could be - still it had laws and forces of its own. For even now he could feel one such force working on him, trying to move, remove, or dislodge him from this unreal place back into the real. But Nathan had a will of his own and wasn’t about to be moved except in the direction he desired.
‘Behind’ Nathan, if mundane directions had any meaning in such a place, the Mobius door closed. And, remembering his purpose here, he pictured the Garden of Repose in Kensington which was his target destination. It had been his plan to ‘picture’ Sir Keenan Gormley’s memorial marker, to focus upon the plaque and use it as a different kind of marker, but he now saw that this wasn’t necessary.
For no sooner had the crematorium in Kensington entered his thoughts, than he found himself in motion and knew that he was headed in that ‘direction’. It was as if he were drawn along a route, though whether in a straight line, a curve, up or down … it was impossible to say or even guess. But definitely he felt the first tentative tugging of some force other than the Mobius Continuum’s rejection forces. Not even a tugging, as such, but more a gentle pressure that seemed to want to guide him. He’d known something like it before when tracking the Mobius loop symbol from Zakynthos in the Aegean back to E-Branch HQ. Then it had been his lifeline - Zek’s, too - and, remembering that, he felt in no way threatened.
He simply went with the motion, the feeling, following it to its source: the co-ordinates of Keenan Gormley’s Garden
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of Repose in Kensington. And, like seeing a light at the end of a tunnel, so Nathan sensed the way ahead and accelerated his metaphysical motion by willing himself . .. that way, towards it. And as if he’d been walking and had suddenly broken into a run, he sensed that he was moving that much faster. So incredibly fast indeed that he was there!
And going from the incalculable ‘velocity’ of thought to stationary in less than a second - yet feeling no discomfort whatsoever - Nathan conjured another Mobius door and stepped across the threshold.
Light! Such brilliant light that he gasped and screwed his eyes tight shut. And gravity! Nathan staggered a moment as his feet touched solid earth and his legs trembled where they took his weight. Then someone said, ‘Now!’ And eager hands reached out to steady him.
And despite that time had seemed to pass during Nathan’s trip from E-Branch HQ to Kensington, this was that same moment when the voice of the esper on the podium made his all-important mistake, and asked his all-important question: ‘Yes, now, for Christ’s sake! Why are you repeating me?’ Which sounded now from a handset in the Kensington crematorium where Nathan stood. Important for this reason: it was the first proof positive that ‘time’ in the Mobius Continuum is non-existent.
‘Well done, Nathan!’ Someone gasped his amazement, his congratulations. While in the Necroscope’s deadspeak mind:
Well done, son! Sir Keenan Gormley applauded his efforts. And now .. . more than ever you feel like your father.
In answer to which, Nathan was quick to inquire: As he was in the beginning, or at the end?
For a moment the other was silent, but Nathan sensed his shudder. Then: It’s true, Harry made mistakes. Sir Keenan gave a deadspeak nod. But don’t forget, mistakes are what make us human.
And, almost as if his experience in the Mobius Continuum had soured his mind, making it caustic and cynical (though in fact it was simply nerves), again Nathan’s rapid riposte,
Oh? But surely, Harry’s mistake made him inhuman! It’s what cost him his humanity! But he knew that the other wasn’t going to let him get away with that.
A clever man learns by his mistakes, Sir Keenan answered in a little while. By his own mistakes, and by those of others. In your case, by your father’s. You have a long way to go yet, son, but Godspeed. And take care along the way, Nathan. Take care along the way …
Nathan used the Mobius Continuum and the markers or co-ordinates which were his ever-growing coterie of dead friends constantly, until the geography of this strange world was no longer just a series of contour lines, trigonometrical points, watercolour oceans or bland white ice-caps in the pages of an atlas, but a living, breathing source of constant wonder, astonishment, even awe. For the difference between this world and his own was like that between garlic and honey; and not simply in the sense that one was sour and the other sweet (not necessarily, for Sunside had its sweetness too), but that in almost every other instance they were poles apart. Indeed, they were parallel dimensions apart!
Only in the mountainous regions was there any real similarity, of flora and fauna, if nothing else; but even the mountains were different in a world where the sun shone on both sides of the range! For this Earth was one world - a complete, continuous system; one system, like a living creature in its own right - while Sunside/Starside, as its name might suggest, had often seemed like two. Sunside was a place of light, warmth, love and life; while Starside was cold and gloomy, full of obscene black hatreds, bitter feuds and loathsome undeath. How could it possibly be otherwise? The one housed the Szgany, Nathan’s people, while the other was home to the Wamphyri!
But Earth - this parallel Earth - was wholly beautiful, and that, despite that, certain of its people were not. So
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Nathan thought at first, anyway, before he’d seen the industrial wastelands of Eastern Europe, and those regions closed off to men forever because of their seething nuclear pollution …
Harry Keogh had had a great many friends among the dead, and now they all wanted to speak to Nathan. In one way it was new to him: the Szgany dead of his home world had wanted nothing to do with him, although he had often heard them whispering to each other in their graves. But on the other hand it seemed very familiar, for the ostensibly ‘primitive’ Thyre of Sunside’s furnace deserts had been eager to know him from the first, when he had gone out into the sweltering desert to die, only to find the will to live and a goal or worthwhile direction in which to aim his life.