Necroscope

'"Eventually?"'

There came a great mental shudder from Borowitz. 'You see, he's not finished with me yet. My body lies in my dacha where he left it, but sooner or later it will be delivered into his hands, and then he'll deal with me as he dealt with Max Batu. I don't want that, Harry. I don't want that scum wading through my guts in search of my secrets!'

Something of his horror .transmitted itself to Harry, but still the necroscope could feel no pity for him. 'I understand your motivation,' he said, 'but if he hadn't killed you I would have. If I could. For my mother, for Keenan Gormley, for everyone you've hurt or would hurt.'

'Yes, yes, of course you would,' said Borowitz without enmity, 'if you could. I was a soldier before I was a schemer, Harry Keogh. I understand honour even if Dragosani doesn't. It's because of all these things that I want to help you.'

'I accept your reasons,' said Harry. 'How can you help me?'

'First I can tell you all I know about the Chateau Bronnitsy: its design and layout, the people who work there. Here, take it all,' and he quickly imparted to Harry all knowledge of the place and of the ESPers who worked there. 'And then I can tell you something else, something

which you, with your special talent, can use to good advantage. I've said I was first a soldier. So I was, and my knowledge of warfare was second to none. I had studied the entire history of warfare from Man's beginnings. I had traced his wars right across the face of the planet, and knew all the old battlefields intimately. You ask how I can help you? Well listen and I'll tell you.'

Harry listened, and slowly his strange eyes opened wider and a grim smile spread itself across his face. He had been weary until now, burdened. But now a massive weight was lifted from his shoulders. He did have a chance, after all. Finally Borowitz was finished.

'Well, we were enemies,' said Harry then, 'even though we never met in the flesh. But I thank you anyway. You know of course that I intend to destroy your organisation as well as Dragosani?'

'No more than he'd destroy it,' the other growled. 'Anyway, I have to go now. There's someone else I want to find, if I can...' And his voice, too, faded into silence.

Harry looked at the rugged terrain all around and saw how the sun dipped lower in the sky. Dust devils raced along a ridge. Kites wheeled in the sky as the day turned towards evening. And for a long while, as the shadows lengthened, he sat there on the sand and pebbles with his chin in his hands, just thinking.

At last he said, 'They all want to help me.'

'Because you bring them hope,' the Witch of Endor told him. 'For centuries, indeed since time itself began, the dead have lain still in their graves and that was that. But now they stir, they seek each other out, they talk to each other in a manner you have taught them. They have found a champion. Only ask of them, Harry Keogh, and they will obey...'

Harry stood up, gazed all around, felt the chill of evening beginning to creep. 'I see no reason to stay here

any longer,' he said. 'As for you, old lady: I don't know how to thank you.'

'I have all the thanks I want,' she answered. The teeming dead thank me.'

He nodded. 'Yes, and there are some of them I want to speak to-first.'

'Go then,' she answered. 'The future waits for you as it waits for all men.'

Harry said no more but conjured the Mobius doors, chose one and walked through it.

He went first to his mother, finding his way to her without difficulty; then to 'Sergeant' Graham Lane at Harden, including a quick jump of only fifty yards or so to the grave of James Gordon Hannant; then to a Garden of Repose in Kensington, where Keenan Gormley's ashes had been scattered, but where Gormley himself remained; and finally to Gregor Borowitz's dacha in Zhukovka. He spent perhaps ten to fifteen minutes in each location with the exception of the last. It was one thing to talk to dead men in their graves but quite another to talk to one who sat there and looked at you with glassy, pus-dripping eyes.

In any case, by the time Harry was through he was satisfied that he knew his business, that he could now safely negotiate the intricacies of the Mobius continuum; and by then there was only one place left to go. But first he took down a double-barrelled shotgun from the wall and filled his pockets with cartridges from a drawer.

It was just 6:30 p.m. East European time when he started to ride the Mobius strip from Zhukovka to the Chateau Bronnitsy. Along the way he became aware that someone rode the strip with him, knew he wasn't alone in the Mobius continuum. 'Who's there?' he called out with his mind in the ultimate darkness of the journey.

'Just another dead man,' came the answer, but in a

voice wry and humourless. 'In my life I read the future, but I had to die to understand and finally realise the full extent of my talent. Strangely, in your "now" I am still alive, but I shall be dead shortly.'

'I don't understand,' said Harry.

'I didn't expect you to understand immediately. I'm here to explain. My name is Igor Vlady. I worked for Borowitz. I made the mistake of reading my own future, my own death. That will happen two days from your "now", as a result of Boris Dragosani's ordering it. But after death I will go on to explore my own potential. What I did in life I will do even better in death. If I wanted to I could see backward to the beginning of time, or go forward to its end - if time had a beginning and an end. But of course it has not; it is all a part of the Mobius continuum, an endlessly twisting loop containing all space and time. Let me show you:'

And he showed Harry the doors into the future and the past, and Harry stood on their thresholds and viewed time that had been and time still to come; except that he could not understand what he saw. For beyond the future-time door all was a chaos of millions of lines of blue light, and one of these streamed from his own being out through the door and into the future - his future. Likewise beyond the past-time door: the same blue light pouring out of him and fading into the past - his past - along with the light of countless millions of others. And such was the dazzling blue brilliance of all those life-threads that he was almost blinded by it.

'But no light shines from you,' he said to Igor Vlady. 'Why is that?'

'Because my light has been extinguished. Now I am like Mobius: pure mind. And where space holds no secrets for him, time holds none for me.'

Harry thought about it, said: 'I want to see my life-thread again.' And again he stood on the threshold of the door to the future. He looked into the bright blue furnace of the future and saw his life-thread shimmering into it like a neon ribbon, and he could see it clearly where it curved away into future time. But even as he watched, so the end of his thread of life came into view; and then it seemed to him that the blue life-light of his body was not flowing out of him but flowing in! The thread was being eaten up by him as he approached his own end! And now that end was plainly visible, speeding towards him like a meteor out of the future!

Quickly, in terror of the Unknown, he stepped back from the door and once more into darkness. 'Am I going to die?' he asked then. 'Is that what you're telling me, showing me?'

'Yes - ' said the time-travelling mind of Igor Vlady ' -and no.'

Again Harry failed to understand. 'I'm about to pass through a Mobius door to the Chateau Bronnitsy,' he said. 'If I'm going to die there I'd like to know it. The Witch of Endor told me that I would lose "something" of myself. Now I've seen the end of my life-thread.' He gave a nervous mental shrug. 'It seems I'm coming to the end of my tether...'