by Brian Lumley
Not that this was the only fortified place in the USSR, far from it. The space centres, nuclear and plasma research stations, and the chemical and biological warfare labs at Berezov were all security hotspots, tight as proverbial drums.
Dragosani scowled. How he wished he had Borowitz here now, downstairs in his operating theatre, stretched out on a steel table with his guts hanging open and all the secrets of his soul laid bare. Ah, well, and that too would come to pass — when they finally found the old bastard’s body!
‘Comrade Dragosani!’ the DO’s voice calling from next door shattered his thoughts to shards. ‘I have GREPO HQ in Berlin for you. I’m putting them through now.’
‘Good,’ he called back. ‘And while I’m speaking to them there’s something else you can do. I want the Chateau searched top to bottom. Especially the cellars. To my knowledge there are rooms down there no one ever went into. I want the place turned inside out. Look for bombs, incendiary devices, for anything at all that looks suspicious. I want as many men on it as possible — particularly the ESPers. Understood?’
‘Yes, Comrade, of course.’
‘Very well, now let me speak to these damned Germans.’
It was 3:15 p.m. and Arctic cold in the city cemetery in Leipzig.
Harry Keogh, his overcoat turned up around his ears and a flask of coffee (long empty) in his lap, sat frozen at the foot of August Ferdinand Mobius’ grave and despaired. He had sought to apply his ESPer’s mind — his ‘metaphysical’ talent — to the equally conjectural properties of altered space-time and four-dimensioned topology and failed. Intuition told him it was possible, that he could in fact take a Mobius trip sideways in time,
but the mechanics of the thing were mountain-sized stumbling blocks that he just couldn’t climb. His instinctive or intuitive grasp of maths and non-Euclidean geometry was not enough. He felt like a man given the equation E = me2 and then asked to prove it by producing an atomic explosion — but with his mind alone! How do you go about turning unbodied numbers, pure maths into physical facts? It’s not enough to know that there are ten thousand bricks in a house; you can’t build the house of numbers, you need the bricks! It was one thing for Mobius to send his unbodied mind out beyond the farthest stars, but Harry Keogh was a physical three-dimensional man of living flesh and blood. And just suppose he succeeded and actually discovered how to teleport himself from ‘A’ to some hypothetical ‘B’ without physically covering the space between. What then? Where would he teleport himself to — and how would he know when he was there? It could prove as dangerous as stepping off a cliff to prove the law of gravity!
For days now he’d occupied his mind with the problem to the exclusion of almost everything else. He had taken food and drink and sleep, yes, attending to all of Nature’s needs, but to nothing else. And still the problem remained unsolved, space-time refused to warp for him, the equations remained dark unfathomed squiggles on the now grubby, well-thumbed pages of his mind. A wonderful ambition, certainly — to impose himself physically within a metaphysical frame — but how to go about it?
‘You need a spur, Harry,’ said Mobius, wearily breaking in on his thoughts for what must be the fiftieth time in the last day or so. ‘Personally, I think that’s all that remains. After all, necessity is the mother of invention, you know. So far you know what you want to do — and I for one believe you have the knack, the intuitive ability, even though you haven’t found it yet — but you haven’t a good enough reason for doing it! That’s all you need
now, the right spur. The prod that will make you take the final step.’
Harry gave a mental nod of acknowledgement. ‘You’re probably right,’ he said. ‘I know I will do it; it’s just that I… haven’t tried yet? It’s something like giving up smoking: you can but can’t. You probably will when it’s too late, when you’re dying of cancer. Except I don’t want to wait that long! I mean, I have all the maths, all the theory — I have all the ego, really, the intuition — but I haven’t the need, not yet. Or the spur, if you like. Let me tell you what it feels like:
‘I’m sitting in a well-lighted room with a window and a door. I look out the window and it’s dark out there. It always will be. Not night but a stronger darkness that will last for ever. It’s the darkness of the spaces between the spaces. I know there are other rooms out there somewhere. My problem is that I don’t have any directions. If I go out that door I’ll be part of the darkness, surrounded by it. I might not be able to come in again, here or anywhere else. It’s not so much that I can’t go out but more that I don’t want to think about what it’s like out there. Actually, to know it’s there is to know I can go out into it. I feel that the going will just be an extension of the other things I can do, but an untried extension. I’m a chicken in a shell, and I won’t break out until I have to!’
‘Who are you talking to, Mr Harry Keogh?’ asked a voice that wasn’t Mobius’, a flat, cold voice, as curious as it was emotionless.
‘What?’ Startled, Harry looked up.
There were two of them, and it was obvious who or what they were. Even knowing nothing about spying or East-West politics, he would have recognised these two on sight. They chilled him more than the thin wind which now began to keen through the empty cemetery, blowing dead leaves and scraps of paper along the aisles between the tombs.
One was very tall, the other short, but their dark-grey overcoats, their hats pulled down at the front and their narrow-rimmed spectacles were so uniform in themselves as to make them appear twins. Certainly twins in their natures, in their thoughts and their petty ambitions. As plain-clothes men — policemen, probably political — they were quite unmistakable.
‘What?’ Harry said again, coming stiffly to his feet. ‘Was I talking to myself again? Fm sorry about that, I do it all the time. It’s just a habit of mine.’
Talking to yourself?’ the tall one repeated him, and shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so.’ His accent was thick, his lips thin as his mirthless smile. ‘I think you were talking to someone else — probably to another spy, Harry Keogh!’
Harry backed away from them a pace or two. ‘I really don’t know what — ‘ he began.
‘Where is your radio, Mr Keogh?’ said the short one. He came forward, kicked at the dirt of the grave where Harry had been sitting. ‘Is it here, buried in the soil, perhaps? Day after day, sitting here, talking to yourself? You must think we’re all fools!’
‘Listen,’ Harry croaked, still backing away. ‘You must have the wrong man. Spy? That’s crazy. I’m a tourist, that’s all.’
‘Oh?’ said the tall one. ‘A tourist? In the middle of winter? A tourist who comes and sits in the same graveyard day after day, to talk to himself? You can do better than that, Mr Keogh. And so can we. We have it on good authority that you are a British agent, also that you’re a murderer. So now, please, you will come with us.’
‘Don’t go with them, Harry!’ it was Keenan Gormley’s voice, coming from nowhere, unbidden to Harry’s mind. ‘Run, man, run!’
‘What?’ Harry gasped. ‘Keenan? But how…?’
‘Oh, Harry! My Harry!’ cried his mother. ‘Please be careful!’
‘What?’ he said again, shaking his head, still backing away from the two men.
The small one produced handcuffs, said: ‘I must warn you, Mr Keogh, against resistance. We are counterespionage officials of the Grenzpolizei, and — ‘
‘Hit him, Harry!’ urged Graham ‘Sergeant’ Lane in Harry’s innermost ear. ‘You have the measure of both these lads. You know the way. Do it to them before they do it to you. But watch it — they’re armed!’
As the short one took three quick paces forward, holding out the handcuffs, Harry adopted a defensive stance. Also closing in, the tall one yelled: ‘What’s this? You threaten violence? You should know, Harry Keogh, that our orders are to take you dead or alive!’
The short one made to snap the cuffs on Harry’s wrists. At the last moment Harry slapped them aside,
half-turned, lashed out with his heel at the end of a leg stiffened into a bar of solid bone. The blow took the short one in the chest, snapped ribs, drove him backwards into his tall colleague. Screaming his agony, he slipped to the ground.
‘You can’t win, Harry!’ Gormley insisted. ‘Not like this.’
‘He’s right,’ said James Gordon Hannant. ‘This is your last chance, Harry, and you have to take it. Even if you stop these two there’ll be others. This isn’t the way. You have to use your talent, Harry. Your talent is bigger than you suspect. I didn’t teach you anything about maths — I only showed you how to use what was in you. But your full potential remains untapped. Man, you have formulae I haven’t even dreamed of! You yourself once said something like that to my son, remember?’
Harry remembered.
Strange equations suddenly flashed on the screen of his
mind. Doors opened where no doors should be. His metaphysical mind reached out and grasped the physical world, eager to bend it to his will. He could hear the felled plain-clothes man screaming his rage and pain, could see the taller one reaching into his overcoat and drawing out an ugly, short-barrelled weapon. But printed over this picture of the real world, the doors in the Mobius space-time dimension were there within reach, their dark thresholds seeming to beckon.
‘That’s it, Harry!’ cried Mobius himself. ‘Any one of them will do!’
‘I don’t know where they go!’ he yelled out loud.
‘Good luck, Harry!’ shouted Gormley, Hannant and Lane, almost in unison.
The gun in the tall agent’s hand spouted fire and lead. Harry twisted, felt a hot breath against his neck as something snatched angrily at the collar of his coat. He whirled, leaped, drop-kicked the tall man and felt deep satisfaction as his feet crashed into face and shoulder. The man went down, his weapon clattering to the hard ground. Cursing and spitting blood and teeth, he scrambled after it, grasped it in two hands, came up into a stumbling crouch.
Out of the corner of his eye, Harry spied a door in the Mobius strip. It was so close that if he reached out his hand he could touch it. The tall agent snarled something incomprehensible, swung his gun in Harry’s direction. Harry knocked it aside, grabbed the man’s sleeve, tugged him off balance and swung him -
— Through the open door.
The German agent was… no longer there! From nowhere, an awful, lingering, slowly fading scream came echoing back. It was the cry of the damned, of a soul lost for ever in ultimate darkness.
Harry listened to that cry and shuddered — but only for a moment. Over and above it as it dwindled, he heard
shouted instructions, the crunch of running feet on gravel. Men were coming, dodging between the tombstones, converging on him. He knew that if he was going to use the doors, it had to be now. The injured agent on the ground was holding a gun in hands that trembled like jelly. His eyes were impossibly round for he had seen… something! He was no longer sure if he dared pull the trigger and shoot at this man.
Harry didn’t give him time to think it over. Kicking his gun away, he paused for one last split-second and let the screens in his mind display once more their fantastic formulae. The running men were closer; a bullet whined where it struck sparks from marble.
Printed over Mobius’ headstone, a door floated out of nowhere. That was appropriate, Harry thought — and he made a headlong dive.
On the cold earth, the crippled East German agent watched him go, disappearing into the stone!
Panting men came together in a knot, skidding to a halt. All held guns extended forward, ready. They stared about, searched with keen, cold eyes. The crippled agent pointed. He lay there with his broken ribs and drained white face and pointed a trembling finger at Mobius’ headstone. But for the moment, stunned to his roots, he said nothing at all.
The keening wind continued to blow.
By 4:45 p.m. Dragosani knew the worst of it. Harry Keogh was alive; he had not been taken but had somehow contrived to make his escape; what means he had employed in that escape were unknown, or at best the accounts were garbled and not to be trusted. But one agent was missing believed dead and another seriously injured, and now the East Germans were making angry noises and demanding to know just who or what they were dealing with. Well, let them demand what they
would — Dragosani only wished he knew what he was dealing with!
Anyway, the problem was his now and time was pressing. For there could no longer be any doubt but that Keogh was coming here, and coming tonight? How? Who could say? When, exactly? That, too, remained impossible to gauge. But of one thing Dragosani was absolutely certain: come he would. One man, hurling himself against a small army! His task was impossible, of course — but Dragosani knew of the existence of many things which ordinary men considered impossible…
Meanwhile, the Chateau’s emergency call-in system had worked well. Dragosani had all the men he had asked for and half-a-dozen more. They manned machine-gun posts on the outer walls, similar batteries in the outbuildings, also the fortified pillboxes built into the buttresses of the Chateau itself. ESPers ‘worked’ down below in the laboratories, in surroundings best suited to their various abilities and talents, and Dragosani had turned Borowitz’s offices into his tactical HQ.
The Chateau had been searched, as per his orders, top to bottom; but as soon as he had learned of Keogh’s escape he had called a halt to that; he had known where the trouble must originate. By then the lower vaults of the place had been explored to the full, floorboards and centuried flagstones had been ripped up in the older buildings, the foundations of the place had been laid bare almost down to the earth itself. Three dozen men can do a lot of damage in three hours, particularly when they’ve been told that their lives may well depend upon it.
But what enraged Dragosani most of all was the thought that all of this was on account of just one man, Harry Keogh, and that utter chaos had been forecast in his name. Which meant quite simply that Keogh wielded an awesome power of destruction. But what was it? Dragosani knew he was a necroscope — so what? Also, he had
seen a dead thing rise up from a river and come to his aid. But that had been his mother and the location had been Scotland, thousands of miles away. There was no one here to fight Keogh’s battles for him.
Of course, if Dragosani was so worried by all of this he could always flee the place (the trouble was scheduled for the Chateau Bronnitsy and nowhere else), but that just wouldn’t be in his own interest. Not only would it smack of utter cowardice, it wouldn’t fulfill Igor Vlady’s prediction — his prediction that the vampire in Dragosani would die this night. And that was one prediction Boris Dragosani desired fulfilled above all others. Indeed it was his ambition, while his mind was still his own to crave for it!
As for Vlady himself — the call-in squad had found a note at his place which explained his absence, a note intended for his fiancée. Vlady would call for her soon, the note said, from the West. Dragosani had been delighted to put out the traitor’s description to all relevant points of egress. Nor had he given him any quarter: he was to be shot on sight, in the name of the security of the mighty USSR.
So much for Vlady, and yet… would he have fared any better here? Dragosani wondered about that. Had he, Dragosani, terrified Vlady that much, or had it been something else he’d fled from?
Something he’d seen approaching, perhaps, out of the very near future.
Chapter Sixteen
It was as Harry had suspected it would be: beyond the Mobius doors he discovered the Primal Darkness itself, that darkness which existed before the universe began.
It was not only the absence of light but the absence of everything. He might be at the core of a black hole, except a black hole has enormous gravity and this place had none. In one sense it was a metaphysical plane of existence, but in another it was not — because nothing existed here. It was simply a ‘place’, but a place in which no God as yet had uttered those wonderful words of evocation, ‘Let there be light!’
It was nowhere, and it was everywhere; it was both central and external. From here one might go anywhere, or go nowhere for ever. And it would be for ever, for in this timeless environment nothing ever aged or changed, except by force of will. Harry Keogh was therefore a foreign body, an unwanted mote in the eye of the Mobius continuum, and it must try to reject him. He felt matter-less forces working on him even now, pushing at him and attempting to dislodge him from the unreal back into the real. Except he must not let himself be pushed.
There were doors he could conjure, certainly, a million million doors leading to all places and all times, but he knew that most of these places and times would be totally lethal to him. No use, like Mobius, to emerge in some distant galaxy in deep space. Harry was not merely a creature of mind but also of matter. He had no desire to freeze, or fry, or melt, or explode.
The problem, then, was this: which door?
Harry’s dive through Mobius’ tombstone might have
carried him a yard or a light-year, he might have been here for a minute or a month, when he felt the first tentative tug of a force other than the rejection forces of this hyperspace-time dimension. Not even a tug, as such, it was more a gentle pressure that seemed to want to guide him. He’d known something like it before, when he’d tracked his mother under the ice and come up in her pool beneath the overhanging bank. There seemed nothing of a threat in it, anyway.
Harry went with it, following it and feeling it intensify, homing in on it as a blind man homes in on a friendly voice. Or a moth on the bright flame of a candle? No, for his intuition told him that whatever it was there was no harm in it. Stronger still the force bobbed him along this parallel space-time stream, and like seeing a light at the end of a tunnel, so he sensed the way ahead and began to will himself in that direction.