Harry was astonished. God had a dark side?
Oh, yes, which he cast out!
The mathematician's words and their delivery had riveted Harry. And I can do the same? Is that what you're saying?
I'm saying that the other places are like levels, some of which are higher and some lower. And what we do here determines the next step. We go up or down.
Heaven or Hell?
Möbius shrugged again. If it helps you to think of it like that.
You mean that when I move on, I can leave my dark side - maybe even my vampire - behind me?
While there's a difference, yes.
A difference?
While we may still distinguish between you.
You mean if I don't succumb?
I have to go now, said Möbius.
But I have to know more! Harry was desperate.
I was allowed to come back, Möbius said, simply. But I am not allowed to stay. My new place is higher, Harry. I really can't afford to lose it.
Wait! Harry tried to stir himself, sit up and take hold of Möbius's wrist. But he couldn't move and anyway, it would be like trying to grasp smoke. And like a set of his own esoteric formulae, the great man mutated into nothingness and was gone...
If anything Möbius's visit had wearied Harry even more than before. He drifted deeper into sleep. But his vampire-influenced mind was full of a certain name, which tormented him and wouldn't let him be. And the name was Johnny Found.
Harry was a telepath; he had a quest, a task which he must finish; and he had a vampire in him. When he had gone to face Faéthor Ferenczy's bloodson Janos in the mountains of Transylvania, the Ferenczy had warned him that only one of them would come out of it alive, and that the winner would be a creature of incredible power. Janos had read the future, seen the same thing, known he couldn't lose. Except... one should never try to understand the future. Read it if you must, but don't try to understand it. Harry had been the one who came down out of the mountains. And though he didn't yet have the measure of his powers - especially his most recent acquisition, telepathy - still they were incredible. They had been incredible before, but now, with the booster which was his vampire...
Dreaming, he no longer had control over his talents, which were active nevertheless. Dreams are the clearinghouses of the mind, where the balance is kept, the cutting-room where all the junk and trivia of life are discarded and the meaningful set in order. That is the function of men's dreams. That and wish fulfilment. And also, for anyone with a conscience, the elevation of suppressed guilt. Which is why men sometimes nightmare.
Harry had his share of guilt, and more than sufficient of desires requiring fulfilment. And what he himself had failed to put in order during his waking hours, his subconscious self - and the vampire which was part of it - would try to put in order while he slept.
His enhanced awareness spread outwards from him to form a telepathic probe which, in a moment, unerringly, leaped all the miles to its target in Darlington. For that target was the sleeping mind of Johnny Found, a mind with a talent as weird as it was warped. Which Harry desired to know about.
And with the sinister guile of the vampire, he need only hint, suggest, propose, strike this chord or maybe that, and with any luck at all Johnny Found would tell him.
All of it ...
Johnny was dreaming, too, of his childhood. This wasn't something he would do voluntarily, but a night spectre kept rapping on the door of childhood memories and demanding that he open it.
Childhood memories? Oh, he had them, but he wouldn't say they were worth remembering or dreaming about. Which was why he didn't. Usually.
He tossed a little in his bed; his subconscious mind moaned and went to take up a hammer to nail shut the door to his past; something pushed the hammer aside, beyond his reach, and Johnny could only watch helplessly as the door creaked open. Inside, all the Bad Things of yesterday were waiting for him: the many small crimes he had committed, and the range of punishments and penalties he'd been made to pay for them. But he'd been a child then and innocent (so they said) and would soon grow out of it; and only Johnny himself had known he wouldn't ever grow out of it, and that they'd never be able to find punishments severe enough to fit his crimes.
They'd tried to convince him that the things he did were bad, and had almost succeeded, but by then he was old enough to know that they lied to him, because they didn't understand. And because they didn't understand, they would never know how good the things were which he did. How good they made him feel.
Yes, it had been a lonely place, childhood, where no one understood him or wanted to know about... the things he did. Because they didn't want even to think of such things, let alone know about them.
Lonely, yes, the place beyond that beckoning door. And how much more lonely if he hadn't had the dead things to talk to? And to play with. And to torment.
But because he'd had that - his secret thing, his clever way with creatures which were no more - being an orphan hadn't been nearly so bad. Because he'd known there were others worse off than him, whose plight was far worse. And that if it wasn't, then Johnny could soon make it worse.
The open door both repelled and attracted him. Beyond it, the mists of memory swirled, eddied and hypnotized him; until - against his will? - Johnny found himself drifting in through the door. Where all his childhood was waiting for him...
They'd called him 'Found' because he had been, in a church. And the pews had vibrated with his screams, and the rafters had echoed with them, that Sunday morning when the verger had come to see what all the to-do was about. He was still bloody from birth, the foundling, and wrapped in a Sunday newspaper; and the placenta which had followed him into the world still warm in a plastic bag, stuffed under the bench in one of the pews.
But lusty? Johnny had screamed to wreck his lungs, howled to break the stained-glass windows and bring down the ceiling, almost as if he'd known he had no right to be in that church. Perhaps his poor mother had known it, too, and this had been her attempt at saving him. Which had failed. And not only was Johnny lost, but so was she.
In any case, he'd yelled like that until they took him out of the church to the intensive care unit of a local hospital's maternity ward. And only then, away from God's house, had he fallen silent.
The ambulance which whirled him to the hospital carried his mother, too, found seated against a headstone in the churchyard in a pool of her own blood, head lolling on her swollen breasts. Except unlike Johnny she didn't survive the journey. Or perhaps she did, for a little while...
A strange start to a strange life, but the strangeness was only just beginning.
In the intensive-care ward Johnny had been washed, cared for, given a cot and, for the moment - and indeed for all his life - a name. Someone had scribbled 'Found' on the plastic tag which circled his little wrist, to distinguish him from all the other babies. And Found he'd stayed.
But when a nurse had looked in on him to see why he'd stopped sobbing and gone quiet so suddenly... that had been the weirdest thing of all. Or perhaps not, depending on one's perspective. For his young mother hadn't been quite dead after all. And perhaps she'd heard the babies crying and had known that one of them was hers. That must be the answer, surely? For what other explanation could there be?
There Johnny's unnamed, unknown mother had sat, beside his empty cot; and Johnny in her dead arms, sucking a dribble of cold milk from a dead, cold nipple.